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NASA’s Juno spacecraft just captured images of colorful bursts of lightning-like electricity in Jupiter’s atmosphere.
These phenomena, which include jellyfish-shaped “sprites” and glowing discs called “elves,” also occur high in the Earth’s atmosphere during thunderstorms.
They were first documented in 1989. Scientists predicted that other lightning planets, such as Jupiter, would also produce these transient light events.
But no one had ever seen alien goblins or elves before.
Juno has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016 and collects images of its auroras in ultraviolet light. A team of researchers who worked on those snapshots recently noticed something odd.
The south pole of Jupiter and a very short flash of light (circled in yellow). (NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI)
“In the process of putting those images together, we noticed that very occasionally we saw these startling, short-lived, bright flashes,” Rohini Giles, a researcher with the Juno team, said at a press conference Tuesday during the annual meeting of the Juno team. division for planetary sciences of the American Astronomical Association.
“We then looked at all the data collected over the four-year mission and found a total of 11 flashes, all with very similar properties,” he added.
Each of these outbursts only lasted a few milliseconds.
Giles’ team published a new study on these flashes in Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets Tuesday.
On Earth, sprites appear as long red tendrils, sometimes descending from a diffuse halo. They happen when lightning produces a “quasi-electrostatic field” at high altitudes, Giles said.
In other cases, lightning strikes electromagnetic pulses upward. The pulses produce luminous discs: elves.
Red sprites over the United States photographed by the ISS in 2015. (NASA)
“On Earth, sprites and elves appear reddish in color due to their interaction with nitrogen in the upper atmosphere,” Giles said. “But on Jupiter, the upper atmosphere is made up mostly of hydrogen, so they would probably appear blue or pink.”
Juno cannot confirm that these events were triggered by lightning, as the spacecraft’s lightning detection tool is located on the other side of the spacecraft from its UV imaging tool. The images of the two instruments are taken at a distance of at least 10 seconds, a delay too long to capture the same brief flash of light.
But everything else indicates that these 11 explosions are transient luminous events: they were extremely short-lived, emitted a lot of hydrogen, and occurred about 186 miles (300 kilometers) above Jupiter’s water clouds, too high to be a lightning.
“We are continuing to look for more telltale signs of elves and goblins every time Juno makes a scientific pass,” Giles said.
“Now that we know what we’re looking for, it will be easier to find them on Jupiter and other planets. And comparing Jupiter’s sprites and elves to those here on Earth will help us better understand electrical activity in planetary atmospheres.”
This article was originally published by Business Insider.
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