Big Auroras on Jupiter

[telfrow]

<i>March 29, 2007: So you thought Northern Lights were big in Alaska? "That's nothing," says Randy Gladstone of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. "Jupiter has auroras bigger than our entire planet."<br /><br />Last month, Gladstone and colleagues used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to capture [the picture attached].<br /><br />The purple ring traces Jupiter's X-ray auroras. Gladstone calls them "Northern Lights on steroids. They're hundreds of times more energetic than auroras on Earth."<br /><br />Chandra has observed Jupiter's auroras many times before, but this recent dataset is exceptional both in length and quality. Gladstone hopes it will help him solve some mysteries lingering for almost 30 years.<br /><br />Jupiter's auroras were discovered by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1979. A thin ring of light on Jupiter's nightside looked like a stretched-out version of our own auroras on Earth. But those early photos merely hinted at the power involved. The real action, astronomers soon learned, was taking place at high-energy wavelengths invisible to the human eye. In the 1990s, ultraviolet cameras on the Hubble Space Telescope photographed raging lights thousands of times more intense than anything ever seen on Earth, while X-ray observatories saw auroral bands and curtains bigger than Earth itself.</i><br /><br />Full Story <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <strong><font color="#3366ff">Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find and not to yeild.</font> - <font color="#3366ff"><em>Tennyson</em></font></strong> </div>