A Blast of Wind From the Sun Squished Jupiter’s Magnetic Shielding

Even gargantuan Jupiter, with its whirling superstorms and volatile temperatures, has a soft side. A team of researchers recently documented stellar winds from the Sun, squishing the planet’s magnetosphere and raising the temperatures in the planet’s atmosphere by 300 degrees Fahrenheit (150 degrees Celsius). The team’s research, published today in Geophysical Research Letters, is the first to document this phenomenon—a burst of solar energy hitting Jupiter. That said, the scientists believe the solar beatdown occurs a few times each month. “We found that Jupiter’s upper atmosphere responds globally—and quite dramatically—to compressions by the impinging solar wind,” said James O’Donoghue, a planetary scientist at the University of Reading in the UK and lead author of the paper, in an email to Gizmodo. “A fast solar wind stream slammed into Jupiter’s magnetosphere, which acts like a giant magnetic bubble pushing back against the solar wind, triggering intense auroral activity which d ... Read full article.