The JWST exposes unexpected behavior in polar lights on jupiter, while a Mars rover holds the first image of an attitude from the surface of another planet.
NASA’s James Web Space Telescope has captured the new details of Aurorus on the largest planet of our solar system. The dance light seen on Jupiter is hundreds of times brighter than seen on earth. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Jonathan Nichols (Lacester University), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Web)
The glowing veils of the Arora appear regularly in the sky above the earth and make it for great images, but capturing this phenomenon on other planets has always been more than a challenge. Recent comments of Mars and Jupiter have now given scientists unprecedented views of these supernatural Arora that will help improve our understanding of the magnetic fields of other planets and the space season of space that they experience in our solar system.
Behind the brightness
When high-energy particle from space is funnel from the Sun to the poles of a planet by its magnetic field and collide with atmospheric gases. On Earth, it produces familiar northern and southern lights, their characteristic with green, red and purple colors.
Jupiter’s Arora works on a large scale. Not only they are physically heavy than the earth, they are also hundreds of times more energetic. While the Earth’s Arora is mainly produced by solar storms, Jupiter has an additional energy source: its vast magnetic field also captures the particles charged from its volcanic moon IO. These particles are accelerated into tremendous motion before banging in Jupiter’s atmosphere, adding solar air and producing acute glow.
Mars presents a completely different scenario. Unlike Earth and Jupiter, Mars has a lack of a global magnetic field, instead scientists call a hybrid magnetosphere, to maintain a small pocket of a magnetic field with localized areas of its crust, mainly in its southern highlands. This unique magnetic environment makes several different types of Martian Aorai, including both local and global Arora, and even oral glow on the planet’s days. Their interaction results from different types of emissions of different energy levels of incoming particles and their unique and complex magnetic environment.
Light show of Jupiter
The JWS image of Arora of Jupiter shown here was captured by the near-covered camera (Nircam) of the telescope on 25 December 2023, shown to Arora that appears to be moving over the planet’s cloud top.
“We wanted to see how quickly the aurus changes, hoping that they expect to fade inside and outside, perhaps more than an hour or an hour. Instead, we looked at the entire ororel region and popped with light, sometimes vary by the other.” Jonathan Nichols said, in a news release, Team lead from Leacester University in the United Kingdom.
The upper and lower atmosphere of the planet can be better understood from the unexpectedly variable nature of Jupiter’s Arora. Additionally, Nicols stated that his team simultaneously studied the planet in ultraviolet light using the Hubble Space Telescope and saw a big difference. The most bright light in JWST images did not appear in the attitude of Hubble, which means the huge amount of low-energy particles was killing the planet and causing infrared glow-and researchers are not yet sure how such a situation arises.
To further understand this discrepancy among the telescopes, the team plans to follow NASA’s Juno spacecraft data, which has been studying Jupiter’s magnetosphere from orbit since 2016. Crafts include equipment to study both infrared and ultraviolet light, so it may be able to provide more insight behind strict behavior.
A historical first
While the Arora of Jupiter has been studied for decades, scientists have also made only a groundbreaking discovery on Mars: the first detection of the visible-conversion from the surface of other planets other than the Earth. In March 2024, persistence rover’s supercam and mastcam-Z tools captured a green glow on 557.7 nanometers arising from nuclear oxygen in the martian atmosphere.
This makes this discovery particularly important about how this happened. Researchers used closely-based simulation to guess when a coronal mass ejection (CME) from the Sun directed to Mars when directed to Mars and would cause Arora. Three days after the CME, the emission was observed, “The suggestion that Arora was inspired by the shock fronts due to the solar outbreak,”, the team writes in a paper published on 14 May. Science progressThis is the first time the Ororel forecast has successfully predicted such an event on another planet.
This work can open new routes to ensure ororel forecasting on Mars and predictions of space weather, potentially important capabilities to ensure safety of human missions.
