The Birth Of Dawn Storm Auroras On Jupiter

Dazzling 'dawn storms' that illuminate Jupiter's poles are 10x more intense than the gas giant's regular auroras.

Transcript

00:00The gas giant Jupiter has shimmering auroras

00:04circling its poles, and new images from NASA's Juno mission

00:08are shining a light on these brilliant displays. In the auroras,

00:12a brief but intense period of brightening sometimes happens in the early morning.

00:16These are called dawn storms, and Juno's images

00:20offered a perspective of the storms that scientists had never seen before.

00:24Telescopes on Earth and the Hubble telescope in space

00:28previously spotted Jupiter's dawn storms, but they only captured partial views.

00:32Juno's ultraviolet spectrograph was the first

00:36imager to peer down at dawn storms from overhead for eight hours at a time

00:40so that scientists could watch the storms as they formed and grew.

00:44They found that the dawn storms were born in darkness,

00:48forming on the planet's nighttime side as isolated glowing spots in auroras.

00:52As Jupiter rotates, the storms travel

00:56to the daytime side and glow even brighter, spewing up to

01:00thousands of gigawatts of ultraviolet light into space.

01:04And at their brightest, dawn storms produce at least ten times more energy

01:08than Jupiter's typical auroras do.

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