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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