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Planetary science

The symphony of Jupiter

Nature Astronomy volume 7, pages 130–131 (2023)Cite this article

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Forty-year monitoring of Jupiter reveals long-term oscillations and teleconnections across the north–south hemispheres and upper–lower atmospheres. This discovery has important implications for the atmospheres of exoplanets and brown dwarfs.

Order emerges from chaos. Like other complex systems, planetary atmospheres self-organize to exhibit quasi-steady, coherent behaviours on many spatial and temporal scales. The long-term oscillations that are not resonant with any external forcing appear to be the most puzzling but tantalizing. In the Earth’s atmosphere–ocean system, decadal modes such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and North Atlantic Oscillation are intimately linked together1. But multiple interactive atmospheric modes of long-term variability had not been detected on other planets before now. Writing in Nature Astronomy, Orton and colleagues2 present forty-year-long continuous infrared data of Jupiter since 1978 that reveal several long-term quasi-periodic variations.

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Fig. 1: Forty-year temperature grooves on Jupiter, much like a steady beat in music, are depicted in this global infrared portrait.

International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLAB/NSF/AURA.

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  1. Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    Xi Zhang

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  1. Xi Zhang
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Correspondence to Xi Zhang.

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Zhang, X. The symphony of Jupiter. Nat Astron 7, 130–131 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-023-01897-y

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