Strange, Glowing Shapes Discovered in Jupiter’s Atmosphere

While Saturn is known for its hexagon, Jupiter has now been found to have its own unique glowing shapes.

Astronomers have spotted unusual, glowing features high in Jupiter’s atmosphere, right above the famous Great Red Spot. These features, found in the ionosphere, are caused by ionized hydrogen, which creates a near-infrared glow in the form of arcs, bands, and spots. This discovery suggests that Jupiter is even more unpredictable than we thought.

“We assumed this area would be quite dull,” said Henrik Melin, a planetary scientist from the University of Leicester in the UK. “But it’s just as fascinating as the northern lights, if not more so. Jupiter always manages to surprise us.”

Jupiter’s atmosphere is a chaotic place, filled with powerful storms and weather systems. The Great Red Spot is the largest storm in our Solar System, about the size of Earth, and has been raging for centuries. Scientists are eager to understand what keeps this storm going for so long. The arrival of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has provided a new way to study it.

The JWST can observe the Universe in near- and mid-infrared light with high resolution, allowing scientists to explore a layer of Jupiter’s atmosphere called the ionosphere. In this layer, ultraviolet solar radiation ionizes hydrogen gas, creating positively charged ions known as trihydrogen cations (H3+), which emit an infrared glow. In Jupiter’s mid- to low-latitude regions, this glow is usually faint and mixed with other brighter glows, making it hard to study H3+ in detail.

Since Jupiter receives only about 4 percent of the solar radiation that Earth gets, scientists thought the glow would be evenly spread out. However, when Melin and his team examined the data from JWST, they found complex structures in the gas, formed by varying concentrations of H3+. This indicates that something other than sunlight is causing these strange shapes.

“One way to change this structure is through gravity waves, similar to waves crashing on a beach and creating ripples in the sand,” Melin explained. “These waves are generated deep in the turbulent lower atmosphere around the Great Red Spot and can travel upward, altering the structure and emissions of the upper atmosphere.”

This suggests that Jupiter’s atmospheric layers are interacting in complex ways. Models of Jupiter’s atmosphere show that gravity waves can create the observed variations in H3+ density in the ionosphere. More observations and analysis are needed to fully understand what’s happening, but it’s a promising area of study. The researchers believe that this discovery highlights an important aspect of Jupiter’s weather that has been overlooked.

“Jupiter’s low-latitude ionosphere has long been considered quite bland, especially compared to the dynamic auroral zones. Our observations show that this is far from true, revealing a richness in features never seen before,” the researchers wrote in their paper.

“The strong coupling between the lower and upper atmospheres at Jupiter may also occur on other giant planets. These JWST observations pave the way for future studies of this region.”

The findings have been published in Nature Astronomy.