NASA’s space probe detects northern lights on Jupiter

If you think the northern lights were a strange sight for terrestrials, you may want to rethink it.

These beautiful colors most visible in the Arctic and Antarctic are not only found on Earth: Jupiter also has northern lights.

The northern lights here on Earth are the result of sun-charged particles that interact with the Earth’s magnetosphere to create that glow we see. There is a continuous ring of this light around the Earth’s poles, but we can’t see it here in Michigan until a solar flare occurs and it accelerates the flow of particles, pushing that ring south.

In the video above, you can see how Jupiter’s auroral ring is almost identical to the ring near one of the Earth’s poles, as viewed with NASA’s Juno spacecraft.

What is especially interesting is that although the auroras of the Earth are caused by charged particles that reach here in the solar wind, on Jupiter, these charged particles come from their volcanically active moon, Io, which is the most volcanically active world. active solar system. at NASA.

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Previous missions didn’t really provide a good look at the Jovian auroras, but Juno is a spacecraft in polar orbit, so these images are our first real dive into the planet’s northern auroras. Jupiter’s new revelations, combined with recent discoveries on Mars, have led to an interesting year of space exploration so far.

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