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Jupiter's aurora warms the planet's atmosphere

09.08.2021

Using data from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, an international team of astronomers has created the most detailed thermal map of the gas giant's upper atmosphere, confirming for the first time that Jupiter's powerful auroras are responsible for heating the entire planet, according to a press service from the University of Leicester (UK).

Auroras occur when charged particles from the solar wind enter the planet's magnetic field. They spiral along the lines of force towards the planet's magnetic poles, striking atoms and molecules in the atmosphere, releasing light and energy. On Earth, this results in a distinctive light show that forms the Northern Lights and the Southern Lights. On Jupiter, material erupting from its volcanic moon Io results in the most powerful aurora in the solar system and high temperatures in the planet's polar regions.

Although Jupiter's auroras have long been considered the main culprits in the heating of the planet's atmosphere, earlier observations have so far been unable to confirm or refute this.

Previous upper-atmospheric temperature maps have been generated using images of just a few pixels. This resolution is not enough to see how temperatures can change across the planet.

In this paper, the researchers created five maps of atmospheric temperature at different spatial resolutions and examined more than 10000 individual data points, only mapping points with an error of less than five percent. The scientists found that high temperatures start within the aurora, as expected from previous work, but now they could observe that Jupiter's aurora - despite covering less than 10% of the planet's area - heats it all up.

Models of the atmospheres of gas giants suggest that they operate like a giant refrigerator, with thermal energy being diverted from the equator to the pole and "deposited" in the lower atmosphere at those pole regions.

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As a test, this technology was used to measure the delay between two pulses of light emitted by different hydrogen isotopes, normal hydrogen (H2) and deuterium (D2), which were simultaneously exposed to a single pulse of laser light. The measured delay was less than three attoseconds, and its cause is the difference in the dynamics of motion of lighter and heavier nuclei of hydrogen isotope atoms.

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