NASA's Juno spacecraft just captured images of multicolored flashes of electric current, lightning, high in Jupiter's atmosphere.
These phenomena, including jellyfish-shaped 'sprites' and glowing discs called 'elves', also occur high in the Earth's atmosphere during thunderstorms.
They were first documented in 1989. Scientists have predicted that other planets with lightning bolts in their atmospheres, such as Jupiter, will also cause these short-term lightning events.
But until now, no one has ever seen alien sprites or discs.
Juno has been in orbit around Jupiter since 2016 and has been collecting ultraviolet images of its auroras. A group of researchers processing these images recently noticed something strange.
Jupiter's South Pole and a very short flash of light (circled in yellow). (NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI).
“As we merged the images, we noticed amazing, short-lived, bright flares from time to time,” said Rohini Giles, a researcher on the Juno team, at a press conference with the American Astronomical Association's planetary sciences division.
“We then looked at all of the data from the four years of the mission and found a total of 11 flares with very similar properties,” she added.
Each of these flashes lasted only a few milliseconds.
Giles' team published new research on these outbreaks Tuesday in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
On Earth, sprites appear as long red tendrils, sometimes descending from a diffuse halo. They occur when a lightning strike creates a 'quasi-electrostatic field' at high altitude, Giles said.
Red sprites over the United States, photographed from the ISS in 2015. (NASA).
In other cases, lightning strikes send electromagnetic pulses upward. The pulses are produced by glowing discs: elves.
“On Earth, sprites and elves appear reddish due to their interaction with nitrogen in the upper atmosphere,” Giles said. “But on Jupiter, the upper atmosphere is mostly hydrogen, so it will be blue or pink.”
This article was published by Business Insider.
Sources: Photo: NASA
