REAL LIFE NEWS: JUPITER’S POLES LIGHT UP INDEPENDENTLY
by Hazed
Jupiter has auroras at both poles: swirling patterns of light that continuously brighten and then dim again, caused by x-ray emissions. But now it has been discovered that the lights at the two poles flash independently from each other.
This has surprised scientists, because they expected the activity of the planet’s two x-ray hot spots to be coordinated through the planet’s magnetic field. That’s how it works on Earth – the northern and southern lights are quite similar to each other, and they more or less mirror each other.
Auroras are generated when charged particles from the solar wind hit the upper atmosphere and are swept along the planet’s magnetic field lines. These particles collide with ions in the atmosphere which excites the atoms to produce electromagnetic radiation, which we see as the bright lights.
The auroras on Jupiter are particularly strong, probably because of the size of the planet. A team from University College London and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics used data taken from the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s Chandra x-ray observatories to produce maps of Jupiter’s x-ray emissions and found hot spots larger than the surface area of the Earth, where the radiation was concentrated at each pole. Each of the two hot-spots has different characteristics and properties, and the exact nature of the emissions is not yet understood.
Licia Ray, who co-authored the paper on this phenomenon, said, “The behaviour of Jupiter’s X-ray hot spots raises important questions about what processes produce these auroras. We know that a combination of solar wind ions and ions of oxygen and sulphur, originally from volcanic explosions from Jupiter’s moon, Io, are involved. However, their relative importance in producing the X-ray emissions is unclear.”
The team hope to use data sent from the Juno probe to study the aurora’s physical processes in more detail.
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/31/jupiters_powerful_auroras_at_each_pole_are_weirdly_distinct/
