Dazzling 'dawn storms' that illuminate Jupiter's poles are 10x more intense than the gas giant's regular auroras.
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00:00The gas giant Jupiter has shimmering auroras
00:04circling its poles, and new images from NASA's Juno mission
00:08are shining a light on these brilliant displays. In the auroras,
00:12a brief but intense period of brightening sometimes happens in the early morning.
00:16These are called dawn storms, and Juno's images
00:20offered a perspective of the storms that scientists had never seen before.
00:24Telescopes on Earth and the Hubble telescope in space
00:28previously spotted Jupiter's dawn storms, but they only captured partial views.
00:32Juno's ultraviolet spectrograph was the first
00:36imager to peer down at dawn storms from overhead for eight hours at a time
00:40so that scientists could watch the storms as they formed and grew.
00:44They found that the dawn storms were born in darkness,
00:48forming on the planet's nighttime side as isolated glowing spots in auroras.
00:52As Jupiter rotates, the storms travel
00:56to the daytime side and glow even brighter, spewing up to
01:00thousands of gigawatts of ultraviolet light into space.
01:04And at their brightest, dawn storms produce at least ten times more energy
01:08than Jupiter's typical auroras do.
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