Detailed New Images of Jupiter’s Aurora Reveal Strange and Unexplained Brightness

NASA’s Webb space telescope has captured haunting new views of Jupiter’s auroral display, revealing the bright light show in exquisite, never-before-seen details. Using the telescope’s most recent observations of the gas giant, scientists uncovered a curious discrepancy between how Jupiter’s auroras appear to Webb versus Hubble. Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) zoomed into Jupiter’s poles to capture the planet’s fast-varying auroral features, which are 100 times brighter than the ones seen on Earth. “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,” Jonathan Nichols, a researcher at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, and lead author of a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications, said in a statement. “Instead, we observed the whole auroral region fizzing and popping with light, sometimes varying by the second.” On Earth, auroras take place when energetic particl ... Read full article.