Electric! Astronomers find sprites in Jupiter's atmosphere
Posted by Paul Scott Anderson in SPACE | October 31, 2020
Scientists with NASA’s Juno mission say they have detected sprites or elves – electrical phenomena above thunderstorms on Earth – in the clouds of Jupiter for the first time. Unlike the red-colored earthly ones however, the Jovian ones are blue.
View larger. | Artist’s concept of a lightning sprite in Jupiter’s atmosphere, based on findings from
the Juno spacecraft, which is orbiting Jupiter now. Scientists believe that, on Jupiter, sprites are
likely blue in color. Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ SwRI.
Lightning sprites are fleeting but powerful electrical discharges high up in Earth’s atmosphere … above thunderstorms. They’re called transient luminous events or TLEs by scientists. They are eerily beautiful, and not easy to capture on film, and it wasn’t that long ago that scientists were debating their existence in Earth’s atmosphere. Now they’re a confirmed natural phenomenon on Earth – the subject of much study by meteorologists – and nature photographers sometimes capture them. And now NASA has found the first evidence of sprites and/or elves – rapidly expanding disk-shaped regions of luminosity, lasting less than a thousandth of a second – somewhere other than Earth. They’ve found them in the turbulent upper atmosphere of our solar system’s largest planet, Jupiter.
The peer-reviewed findings were announced by scientists with the Juno mission at Jupiter and published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets on October 27, 2020. The results were also presented in a press conference during the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS 2020).
Scientists had theorized that sprites or elves should be present in Jupiter’s atmosphere, but this is the first good evidence that they actually exist. How did they find them?
Along with taking images in regular light, Juno also views Jupiter with its ultraviolet spectrograph instrument (UVS). In the summer of 2019, researchers were studying these images and discovered something interesting: a narrow, bright streak of ultraviolet light, which appeared to be what scientists had hoped to find, a sprite.
More:
https://earthsky.org/space/sprites-or-elves-in-jupiters-atmosphere-lightning-juno
= new reply since forum marked as read
