NASA's Juno Spots "Dancing' Sprites, Elves" in Jupiter's Atmosphere

NASA's Juno mission has just recorded pictures of vivid lightning-like flashes of energy high in the atmosphere of Jupiter.

These objects, including jellyfish-shaped "sprites" and flickering discs termed "elves," often arise way up in the Earth's atmosphere during thunderstorms. In 1989, they were first recorded. Scientists expected that these intermittent luminous events would also create other planets that have lightning, including Jupiter.

While sprites and elves are mythical beings in English mythology, the magical names are still used for the bright luminous occurrences that shocked scientists scouring Juno data in 2019.

In a recent study, a team of researchers explains their observation in Jupiter's atmosphere of transient luminous events (TLE). Thanks to data from NASA's Juno spacecraft, which has orbited Jupiter since 2016, the anomaly was spotted.

The researchers detected 11 intense flashes in the area where lightning storms are believed to occur by scouring data from the spacecraft's ultraviolet spectrograph. The blinding sparks lingering for mere milliseconds, though, appeared just too high in the sky to be merely lighting.

"In the process of putting together those images, we noticed that very occasionally we saw these surprising, short-lived, bright flashes," Rohini Giles, a researcher on the Juno team, said in a press conference on Tuesday, during the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Association's Division for Planetary Sciences.

"We then went and searched through all of the data that we've taken over four years of the mission and we found a total of 11 flashes all with very similar properties," she added. Each of these outbursts was just a couple of milliseconds long.

Giles' team uploaded a new report on these bursts in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

How Does It Look Like?

Sprites appear like jellyfish, with a "central glob" and tendrils that stretch both downward and upward, according to a NASA press release. Elves are very flat, on the other side, but might be bigger than sprites.

In other situations, electric waves are sent upward from lightning bolts. The pulses create glowing disks called elves.

"On Earth, sprites and elves appear reddish in color due to their interaction with nitrogen in the upper atmosphere," Giles said. "But on Jupiter, the upper atmosphere mostly consists of hydrogen, so they would likely appear either blue or pink."

Juno can't prove that lightning strikes caused these incidents yet because the probe's lightning-detecting device is from its UV imaging device on the other side of the spacecraft. Photos are captured at least 10 seconds away by all devices, a gap that is too lengthy to catch the exact fleeting burst of illumination.

But everything that points to intermittent luminous events being these 11 outbursts: they were very short-lived, released tons of hydrogen, and appeared around 186 miles (300 kilometers) above the water clouds of Jupiter, too far to be lightning.

The researchers continue to look for more telltale signs of elves and sprites every time Juno does a science pass. Gilles said that scientists better understand electrical activity in planetary atmospheres by comparing elves and sprites from Jupiter with those here on Earth.

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