[ad_1]
Phenomena with a supernatural name refer to transient luminous events: luminous flashes, unpredictable and bizarre.
It is the first time such events have ever been seen on another world, NASA says.
The lights on the largest planets in the solar system were predicted by scientists, who thought they would be observed in Jupiter’s liquid atmosphere.
They were discovered by scientists who were working with the ultraviolet spectrograph instrument on Juno, a space probe orbiting the planet.
“UVS was designed to characterize Jupiter’s beautiful northern and southern lights,” said Giles, a Juno scientist and lead author of the paper.
“But we discovered UVS images that not only showed Juno’s aurora, but also a bright flash of UV light in the corner it wasn’t supposed to be. The more our team looked at them, the more we realized that Juno might have detected. a TLE on Jupiter “.
A “sprite” is a transient light event triggered by lightning discharges from storms below.
On Earth, they last only a few milliseconds, distinguishable by a central light with long tendrils extending both towards the ground and upward towards the sky.
Meanwhile “elves”, which is short for Light Emission and Very Low Frequency Perturbations due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources, look like a flattened disk and are found in the upper atmosphere.
Although they are equally ephemeral, they can reach sizes of 320 kilometers on Earth.
An illustration of what a sprite might look like in Jupiter’s atmosphere.
“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.”
These events could have simply been massive lightning strikes, but scientists quickly ruled out this possibility; the lights were found 300 kilometers) above the altitude of Jupiter’s water cloud layer, where most of the planet’s lightning strikes form.
In addition, the spectrograph recorded that the bright flashes were dominated by hydrogen emissions.
“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.”
The findings were published October 27, in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
It reported information on Jupiter’s massive storms by providing scientists with crucial “Jovian lightning” data that revealed that they are even more similar to Earth’s storms than previously thought.
Source link
