The Birth of Dawn Storm Auroras on Jupiter
Dazzling 'dawn storms' that illuminate Jupiter's poles are 10x more intense than the gas giant's regular auroras.
Transcript
00:00 The gas giant Jupiter has shimmering auroras circling its poles,
00:05 and new images from NASA's Juno mission are shining a light on these brilliant displays.
00:10 In the auroras, a brief but intense period of brightening sometimes happens in the early morning.
00:16 These are called dawn storms, and Juno's images offered a perspective of the storms that scientists had never seen before.
00:24 Telescopes on Earth and the Hubble Telescope in space previously spotted Jupiter's dawn storms,
00:30 but they only captured partial views.
00:33 Juno's ultraviolet spectrograph was the first imager to peer down at dawn storms from overhead for eight hours at a time
00:40 so that scientists could watch the storms as they formed and grew.
00:44 They found that the dawn storms were born in darkness,
00:48 forming on the planet's nighttime side as isolated glowing spots in auroras.
00:53 As Jupiter rotates, the storms travel to the daytime side and glow even brighter,
00:58 spewing up to thousands of gigawatts of ultraviolet light into space.
01:03 And at their brightest, dawn storms produce at least ten times more energy than Jupiter's typical auroras do.
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