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Evidence for auroral influence on Jupiter’s nitrogen and oxygen chemistry revealed by ALMA

Nature Astronomy volume 7, pages 1048–1055 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

The localized delivery of new long-lived species to Jupiter’s stratosphere by comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 in 1994 opened a window to constrain Jovian chemistry and dynamics by monitoring the evolution of their vertical and horizontal distributions. However, the spatial distributions of CO and HCN, two of these long-lived species, had never been jointly observed at high latitudinal resolution. Atacama large millimeter/submillimeter array observations of HCN and CO in March 2017 show that CO was meridionally uniform and restricted to pressures lower than 3 ± 1 mbar. HCN shared a similar vertical distribution in the low- to mid-latitudes, but was depleted at pressures between \({2}_{-1}^{+2}\) and \({0.04}_{-0.03}^{+0.07}\) mbar in the aurora and surrounding regions, resulting in a drop by two orders of magnitude in column density. We propose that heterogeneous chemistry bonds HCN on large aurora-produced aerosols at these pressures in the Jovian auroral regions causing the observed depletion.

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Fig. 1: Sample of HCN and CO spectra observed with ALMA in Jupiter on 22 March 2017.
Fig. 2: HCN and CO volume mixing ratio vertical profiles in Jupiter’s stratosphere.
Fig. 3: CO (top) and HCN (bottom) column densities as a function of planetocentric latitude at the longitudes of the two observed limbs.
Fig. 4: Polar projections of the HCN column density.

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Data availability

Observation data can be obtained from the ALMA archive. Temperature profiles, HCN and CO limb spectra and retrieved vertical profiles can be obtained from the following Zenodo repository: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7928701.

Code availability

Software used for the retrievals is available upon request by contacting the corresponding author.

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Acknowledgements

T.C. acknowledges funding from CNES and the Programme National de Planétologie of CNRS/INSU. This paper makes use of the following ALMA data: ADS/JAO.ALMA\#2016.1.01235.S. ALMA is a partnership of ESO (representing its member states), National Science Foundation (USA) and NINS (Japan), together with the National Research Council (Canada), MOST and ASIAA (Taiwan) and KASI (Republic of Korea), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. The Joint ALMA Observatory is operated by ESO, AUI/NRAO and NAOJ.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bordeaux, CNRS, LAB, UMR 5804, Pessac, France

    T. Cavalié, B. Benmahi & M. Dobrijevic

  2. LESIA, Paris Observatory, University of PSL, CNRS, Sorbonne University, University of Paris, Meudon, France

    T. Cavalié, R. Moreno, E. Lellouch & T. Fouchet

  3. Max-Planck-Institute for Solar System Research, Göttingen, Germany

    L. Rezac & P. Hartogh

  4. Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, TX, USA

    T. K. Greathouse & V. Hue

  5. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    J. A. Sinclair

  6. LATMOS, CNRS, UVSQ University of Paris-Saclay, Sorbonne University, Guyancourt, France

    N. Carrasco & Z. Perrin

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Contributions

T.C. and L.R. performed the modelling and data analysis. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to T. Cavalié.

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Nature Astronomy thanks Imke de Pater, Conor Nixon and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Temperature fields used in the abundance retrievals.

The fields at 170 W (left) and 350 W (right) correspond to the eastern and western limbs, respectively, as reconstructed from the retrievals obtained from Gemini/TEXES observations on March 14–20, 2017.

Extended Data Fig. 2 HCN (left) and CO (right) VMR vertical profile retrieval examples.

The a priori and retrieved profiles are shown in black and blue, respectively. The shaded region encompasses the range of 1-σ uncertainties due to random measurement errors. The measurement spectra (black) and fitted spectra (magenta) along with the residuals are shown as well.

Extended Data Fig. 3 HCN (left) and CO (right) vertical profiles in Jupiter’s stratosphere, as retrieved from the ALMA observations of March 22nd, 2017.

They are grouped in latitude bins, similarly to Fig. 2.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Fig. 1.

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Cavalié, T., Rezac, L., Moreno, R. et al. Evidence for auroral influence on Jupiter’s nitrogen and oxygen chemistry revealed by ALMA. Nat Astron 7, 1048–1055 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-023-02016-7

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