Check Out Jupiter’s Incredible Aurora That Is Baffling Scientists
— Updated on 15 June 2021

Check Out Jupiter’s Incredible Aurora That Is Baffling Scientists

— Updated on 15 June 2021
John McMahon
WORDS BY
John McMahon

There are no shortages of incredible visuals across our social feeds day in and day out of the memorising natural phenomenons that are the Aurora Borealis & Aurora Australis.

What people may not realise is that this incredible dancing light show is not exclusive to our planet, but that Jupiter actually boasts the most powerful of them all in our solar system. This visualisation of force can reach 30 times the strength of the energy seen in Earth’s version – that you’d probably be familiar with as the “Northern Lights.”

Only several thousand volts of energy are necessary here at home to produce the dazzling spectacle, which occur when electrically charged particles released from our sun strike the atmosphere at speed, particularly at our planet’s magnetised poles.

Jupiter, however, can produce electrons generating up to 400,000 volts of energy, thus creating an aurora a few times the size of Earth over predominantly its northern pole.

NASA’s Juno space craft is currently orbiting the solar system’s largest planet, capturing insane images you can see above and measuring the level of electromagnetic activity on the planet.

Not all these measurements have been adding up, however, with the aurora occurring in some instances without such dramatic figures on the scale. Thus meaning that an unknown, unobservable force is behind some of the aurora displays witnessed on the planet.

“On Jupiter, the brightest auroras are caused by some kind of turbulent acceleration process that we do not yet understand very well,” Barry Mauk of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory explains.

It has been theorised that as these particularly strong energy displays get more and more intense, at an indefinable and unstable breaking point an entirely new acceleration force then takes over – but nobody has any clue what it actually is.

Jupiter has been a considerable focus for scientists over the decades due to its tendency to defy the majority of physics laws studied here on Earth. With a magnetic field 200,000 times stronger than ours, its radiation belt is in fact gradually destroying the Juno spacecraft right at this very moment.

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John McMahon
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John McMahon is a founding member of the Boss Hunting team who honed his craft by managing content across website and social. Now, he's the publication's General Manager and specialises in bringing brands to life on the platform.

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