Jupiter is a planet of storms, but also a planet of mysteries. How can an extension of the gas giant spinning with cyclones also be a desert?
Expect anything from a planet famous (or infamous) for things like its Great Red Spot and a strange stormy pentagon that could go through a UFO formation. Jupiter’s “hot spots” (first sighted by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft) were an enigma that has remained in the dark until now. Now his Juno probe has had another look. They were previously thought to be local deserts. What Juno emitted backwards suggests that these hot spots, which shine deceptively bright in the infrared, may not be as different from the rest of Jupiter, at least the part of Jupiter in which they exist. This entire region of the planet is a cosmic desert.
It turned out that Galileo wrapped up without even knowing it. Because it submerged in one of the hot spots in the northern equatorial region of Jupiter and found the dry and windy weather, Earth astronomers automatically assumed that each hot spot was its own localized desert. They are much deeper and beyond that, if you ask Juno co-researcher Tristan Guillot.
“We’re seeing that the whole area has little abundance of ammonia and we realize that the hot spots can only be cleaning up in the clouds,” Guillot told SYFY WIRE. “The storms we see in the JunoCam images must have carried both ammonia and water to the bottom, not just where the hot spots are, but everywhere around these latitudes.”
Juno has revealed that the hot spots have something to do with the cracks in Jupiter’s thick clouds, which could allow the probe to penetrate into the depths of the Jovian atmosphere, where it is hotter and drier than anywhere else. . Another thing Juno saw was that a phenomenon known as shallow lightning was being fed by these desert storms. For lightning to form, there needs to be a liquid in the atmosphere to increase the particles and transfer the charge. A shallow lightning is so rare because it can occur at atmospheric levels too cold to keep the water liquid. This is where ammonia comes in. If you mix water and ammonia, you can keep the water liquid so that lightning can ignite even in such a deep freeze.
It just gets weird from here. Juno’s microwave instrument can no longer see water or ammonia when they join forces. Not only that, but they also produce alien hailstones not so scientifically called balls. The gigantic storms that arise from the condensation of much deeper water into the atmosphere lead to the formation of mushrooms. A shallow lightning literally illuminates where these storms form, which could ultimately help you understand how heat moves around the planet. If humans could actually live on Jupiter, shallow lightning would be a sign of fear of incoming balls.
“The mushrooms reveal that Jupiter’s atmosphere is quite different from what was expected,” Guillot said. “Instead of being convectively unstable and homogeneously mixed, we now imagine the deep atmosphere as a stable average, with an increase in the abundances of water and ammonia as you go deeper.”
When the balls grow heavy enough, they fall into the atmosphere and leave behind a region almost devoid of ammonia and water. They must melt and evaporate so that ammonia and water become gases again and therefore once again visible to Juno. Guillot sees that the behavior of ammonia and water in Jovian storms is similar to the addition of milk to water without mixing liquids. Milk will sink to the bottom of the glass, just as water and ammonia will sink through Jupiter’s atmosphere during a storm. The difference is that, unlike a glass, Jupiter has no bottom or surface that we know of. How deep ammonia and water can sink is something that will need to be further investigated. Hypothetically it could sink to the end. Nobody knows.
What the Juno team needs to do now is figure out the effectiveness of mushroom mushroom formation and how to apply it to Juno data. The probe has already allowed Juno’s team to get an idea of how much water is hidden deep in Jupiter’s atmosphere. To get a more accurate estimate, they will need to understand how water goes to the depths of other regions. Juno can demystify this as he gradually heads to the north pole of Jupiter, which is believed to have very different properties that could explain to Guillot and his colleagues even more about the bizarre Jovian time.
“Our research has far-reaching implications,” he said. “All the planets in our solar system, as well as exoplanets, have very light atmospheres. The same process could occur when elements condense in these atmospheres. Understanding what is happening on Jupiter will be crucial in applying our models to interpret exoplanetary spectra that will soon be measured by the James Webb Space Telescope.