Abstract
The atmospheric dynamics of Jupiter are dominated by strong zonal winds engulfing the planet. Since the first gravity measurements taken by Juno at Jupiter, the low-degree gravity harmonics (J3–J10) have been used to determine the depth and structure of the zonal winds observed at the cloud level, limiting inferences on the deep flows to the wide latitudinal structure of these harmonics. Here, using constraints on the dynamical contribution to gravity at high latitude, we present the gravity harmonics up to J40. We find an excellent correlation between these measurements and the gravity harmonics resulting from the observed cloud-level winds extending inwards cylindrically to depths of ~105 bar (3,000 km). These measurements provide direct evidence that the flows penetrate inwards along the direction of the spin axis, confirming the cylindrical nature of the flow, which has been postulated theoretically since the 1970s. Furthermore, this detailed new gravity spectrum allows us to quantify the contribution of the various jets to the gravity signal, showing the dominance of the strong zonal flows around 20° latitude in both hemispheres.
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All data are available via Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/F63FFC.
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Acknowledgements
We thank R. Chemke for helpful discussions. Y.K., E.G., K.D. and N.G. acknowledge support from the Israeli Ministry of Science and Technology (grant number 96958) and the Helen Kimmel Center for Planetary Science at the Weizmann Institute. D.D. and L.I. acknowledge support from the Italian Space Agency (grant number 2022-16-HH.0). All authors acknowledge support from the Juno mission.
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Y.K. and E.G. designed the study. Y.K. wrote the paper. E.G. developed the gravity inversion model and performed the calculations. R.S.P. designed the constrained approach and carried out the analysis of Juno gravity data with D.R.B., M.P., D.D. and L.I. K.D. and N.G performed the idealized models interpreting the gravity signal, density structure and ring mass. D.J.S. led the working group within the Juno Science Team and provided theoretical support. T.G. provided theoretical support. S.J.B. supervised the planning, execution and definition of the Juno gravity experiment and provided theoretical support. All authors contributed to the discussion and interpretation of the results.
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Extended data
Extended Data Fig. 1 Jupiter’s measured and wind-induced calculated gravity harmonics (J2 - J24) in the standard log-scale.
Positive (negative) values are represented in full (open) symbols. Top: the measured gravity harmonics based on the first two gravity orbits (Iess et al.9) (blue) and the first 10 gravity orbits (Durante et al.28) (green) compared to the calculated gravity harmonics resulting from the cloud-level winds using the thermal wind balance calculation13 (red), and those arising from solid-body rotation alone12 (gray). Bottom: The measured gravity harmonics using the constrained solution of this study (black) and the wind-induced gravity harmonics (red).
Extended Data Fig. 2 The meridional and vertical structure of the zonal wind.
Top: Jupiter’s cloud level winds58 (black) and their measurement uncertainty (gray) used for the calculation of the error bars in Fig. 2. Bottom: The vertical radial decay function for the cloud-level winds optimized for best matching J3; J5, J7 and J9 (black)10, the simplified hyperbolic-tangent functions used for the comparison in Fig. 3d (blue, red and green, corresponding to the colors in Fig. 3d), and the best fitting profile when including magnetic constraints14 (yellow, in the context of this study it gives similar results to the red profile).
Extended Data Fig. 3 Experiments with winds decaying in the cylindrical direction.
a. Jupiter’s measured gravity harmonics with the constrained solution (black) and the corresponding calculated wind-induced gravity harmonics based on projecting the cloud-level winds inward (red) cylindrically along the direction of the spin axis (a), as in Fig. 2 in the main text. b. A similar analysis, but with the wind decay being along the direction of the spin axis (z) instead of radially as done in the rest of the paper (using the same depth as in Fig. 2b). c. Same as (b), but with the decay being at 5000 km (the best optimized value).
Extended Data Fig. 4 The density anomaly balancing the wind field.
a. The wind decay rate (Q(r)) as in Extended Data Fig. 2 (black) used for both examined wind profiles in this figure. b. Jupiter’s full wind field58, ms−1, projected inward in a direction parallel to the axis of rotation, and decaying radially according to panel a. c. same as panel b, but with only the cloud-level jet of 21° N, ms−1. d. The static density component (ρ(r), kg m−3), which varies only with radius. e. and f. The dynamical density component (ρ’, kg m−3) associated with the full wind field (panel b) and the 21° N jet (panel c) according to TW balance (Eq. 8), respectively. g. The vertical shear of the multiplication of panels a and d (\(\partial /{\partial }_{{{{\rm{z}}}}}({{{\rm{Q}}}}\bar{\rho })\), blue), the vertical shear of panel a (∂Q/∂z, yellow), and the vertical shear of panel d (\(\partial {\bar{\rho }}/\partial {{{\rm{z}}}}\), orange). h. and i. The gravitational anomaly, mGal, at the cloud-level, associated with the density field from panel e and f, respectively. The gravity anomaly was reconstructed with J3, J5, J7, J9 and J11-40; see Eq. (10). In a-g the dashed black line represents a depth of about 1900 km from the cloud-level, where the vertical shear in panel g (blue) changes sign. Dashed red line represents the 3000 km depth, where the vertical shear of panel a (∂Q/∂z, yellow line in panel g) is minimal, representing the inflection depth.
Extended Data Fig. 5 A synthetic Gaussian pulse represented using Fourier transform.
Three tests are performed: different pulse heights (left panels), different pulse widths (middle panels), and different pulse locations (right panels). Each test is shown in the real space a-c, in spectral space d-f, and in a magnitude plot (absolute value) g-i. A control experiment is equivalent in all three cases (yellow). See text in Methods for further details.
Extended Data Fig. 6 The surface gravity signal and how it is expressed in the gravity harmonics.
a. the surface gravity signal resulting from the 21° N observed jet (gray), and a simple synthetic gaussian function that fits best the observed values (red). Also shown are two variants, a narrower synthetic function (blue), and a wider synthetic function (green). b. the measured gravity harmonics (black), and the gravity harmonics calculated from the surface gravity shown in (a). c. same as upper panels, but for two other synthetic cases, with the surface gravity shifted poleward (green) and equatorward (blue) by 5°. d. the resulting gravity harmonics from (c).
Extended Data Fig. 7 Comparing the TW and TGW solutions.
a. Jupiter’s measured gravity harmonics with the constrained solution (black), the corresponding calculated wind-induced gravity harmonics (red) based on projecting the cloud-level winds inward cylindrically along the direction of the spin axis as in Fig. 2 in the main text, and the solution including the self-gravity term as in Eq. (7), using the solution method of Wicht et al., 202048 (green). The difference between the two solutions is shown by the gray circles. The results are consistent with those of Wicht et al., 2020. b. The relative contribution of the self-gravity term to the gravity harmonics showing the contribution are overall small, particularly for the high-harmonics. The values of J6 for both the TW and TGW are very close to zero (panel a), and thus the relative contribution is not meaningful and not shown in panel b.
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Kaspi, Y., Galanti, E., Park, R.S. et al. Observational evidence for cylindrically oriented zonal flows on Jupiter. Nat Astron 7, 1463–1472 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-023-02077-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-023-02077-8
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