NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured stunning images of dancing lights, called auroras, on Jupiter. Similar to the Northern Lights we see on Earth, these are a hundred times brighter because of a strong magnetic field.
The US space agency shared the video of Jupiter's aurora on X with the caption, "NASA Webb captured new details of auroras on Jupiter. These dancing lights are huge in size and are hundreds of times more energetic than auroras on Earth."
A team of scientists led by Jonathan Nichols from the University of Leicester made these observations with Webb's NIRCam on December 25, 2023, as per Science. He said, "What a Christmas present it was-it just blew me away!"
Describing it, he said that scientists believed Jupiter's aurora would change slowly, maybe taking around 15 minutes to fade in and out, but instead, they were fizzing and popping really fast.
He said, "We wanted to see how quickly the auroras change, expecting them to fade in and out ponderously, perhaps over a quarter of an hour or so. Instead, we observed the whole auroral region fizzing and popping with light, sometimes varying by the second."
The JWST team explained how these aurora lights formed on Jupiter. The largest planet has a moon called "Lo," which has many volcanoes. As these volcanoes shoot out particles in space, some are pulled into Jupiter's magnetic field and cause auroras.
Mr Nichols added that the observations were even more special as scientists also took pictures of Jupiter's aurora at the same time using the Hubble Space Telescope. "Bizarrely, the brightest light observed by Webb had no real counterpart in Hubble's pictures," he stated.
Scientists discovered that certain bright spots seen in Webb's images did not appear in Hubble. "This has left us scratching our heads," he added.
The team now intends to investigate this disparity between the Hubble and Webb findings and look into the larger implications for Jupiter's space environment and atmosphere.
