Planetary science: An auroral flare on Jupiter

Jupiter visible image: Reta Beebe/Amy Simon/NASA

During observations by the Hubble Space Telescope of Jupiter's aurora, a remarkable auroral flare was detected. The cover shows a composite Hubble image of the planet, with the UV flare superimposed (based on combined frames from the movie of the flare's development, accessible at http://pluto.space.swri.edu/yosemite
/jupiter/flare.html and as Supplementary Information on nature.com). The flare was extremely short-lived and 10 times brighter than any previously observed on the planet, indicating a new auroral process. The location inside the polar cap suggests that it was generated by a mechanism more like that seen on Earth than the 'normal' run of jovian aurorae.

letters to nature
An auroral flare at Jupiter
J. H. WAITE, JR G. R. GLADSTONE, W. S. LEWIS, R. GOLDSTEIN, D. J. MCCOMAS, P. RILEY, R. J. WALKER, P. ROBERTSON, S. DESAI, J. T. CLARKE & D. T. YOUNG
Nature 410, 787-789 (12 April 2001)
| First Paragraph | Full Text | PDF (880 K) | Supplementary Information |

Jupiter's got flare
The dramatic and eeire light-shows seen near the Earth's poles (the aurora borealis in the north and the aurora australis in the south) are caused by charged particles spewing out from the Sun — the solar wind. The particles are guided towards the poles by the Earth's magnetic field, where they collide with atomic oxygen and other particles in the upper atmophere, ionising them. The aurorae's light is generated when these excited particles decay to lower energy states. (12 April 2001)

space: Jupiter's got flare
An Earth-sized flash on Jupiter has planet-watchers baffled.

12 April 2001 table of contents