Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

Jupiter’s magnetosphere ‘acts like a giant particle accelerator’

Georgina Torbet
By

Jupiter is a planet with some notable quirks. As well as its visually distinctive appearance, including stunning bands of clouds and the enormous storm which forms the Great Red Spot, it is also known to give off X-rays.

However, there are oddities about the X-rays it produces, which are related to its auroras. There is an open question about why the Ulysses mission, which flew past Jupiter in 1992, didn’t detect any X-rays. Now, a new paper using NASA’s NuSTAR observatory has solved this long-term mystery.

Related Videos
Jupiter’s southern hemisphere is shown in this image from NASA’s Juno mission.
Jupiter’s southern hemisphere is shown in this image from NASA’s Juno mission. New observations by NASA’s NuSTAR reveal that auroras near both the planet’s poles emit high-energy X-rays, which are produced when accelerated particles collide with Jupiter’s atmosphere. Enhanced image by Kevin M. Gill (CC-BY) based on images provided courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS

NuSTAR is a space-based X-ray telescope launched in 2012, which detects high-energy X-rays which are more energetic than the kinds of X-rays typically detected by other X-ray observatories like Chandra. By investigating Jupiter with NuSTAR, researchers were able to see the highest-energy light ever detected from Jupiter, even higher energy than the planet’s X-ray auroras.

Related

“It’s quite challenging for planets to generate X-rays in the range that NuSTAR detects,” said lead author of the study, Kaya Mori, in a statement. “But Jupiter has an enormous magnetic field, and it’s spinning very quickly. Those two characteristics mean that the planet’s magnetosphere acts like a giant particle accelerator, and that’s what makes these higher-energy emissions possible.”

This mechanism might also explain why the Ulysses mission didn’t spot any high-energy X-rays during its flyby. The particular type of emissions caused by the interactions of electrons in the atmosphere are bright at only a particular energy level and would have been too faint for Ulysses to spot.

Even though this mystery is solved, there are still many questions about how these emissions are formed. “The discovery of these emissions does not close the case; it’s opening a new chapter,” said co-author William Dunn. “We still have so many questions about these emissions and their sources. We know that rotating magnetic fields can accelerate particles, but we don’t fully understand how they reach such high speeds at Jupiter. What fundamental processes naturally produce such energetic particles?”

The research is published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Water was present in our solar system before the sun formed
This artist’s impression shows the planet-forming disc around the star V883 Orionis. In the outermost part of the disc water is frozen out as ice and therefore can’t be easily detected. An outburst of energy from the star heats the inner disc to a temperature where water is gaseous, enabling astronomers to detect it. The inset image shows the two kinds of water molecules studied in this disc: normal water, with one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms, and a heavier version where one hydrogen atom is replaced with deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen.

You might assume that there has always been water on Earth -- that water was there from the very beginning when our planet formed. But scientists increasingly think that water on Earth may have originated elsewhere, and been carried here by comets. However, the water in the comets had to come from somewhere, and astronomers recently made a discovery which could shed light on how that water was found in the solar system.

The researchers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a radio telescope array in Chile, to study a planet-forming disc around the star V883 Orionis, looking for water there to see how it would be transported as the disk evolves into planets.

Read more
Hubble captures a messy irregular galaxy which hosted a supernova
The irregular spiral galaxy NGC 5486 hangs against a background of dim, distant galaxies in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The tenuous disk of the galaxy is threaded through with pink wisps of star formation, which stand out from the diffuse glow of the galaxy’s bright core.

This week's image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a dramatic spiral galaxy called NGC 5486, which is shot through with wisps of pink showing regions where new stars are being born.

Located 110 million light-years away in the famous constellation of Ursa Major, this galaxy is a type called an irregular spiral galaxy because its arms are wandering and indistinct. If you compare the image of this galaxy to one of a quintessential spiral galaxy like NGC 2336, you'll see that a non-irregular spiral galaxy has clearly defined arms that reach out from its center and are symmetrical.

Read more
How James Webb is peering into galaxies to see stars being born
Researchers are getting their first glimpses inside distant spiral galaxies to see how stars formed and how they change over time, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope’s ability to pierce the veil of dust and gas clouds.

Recently astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to look at the structures of dust and gas which create stars in nearby galaxies. Now, some of the researchers have shared more about the findings and what they mean for our understanding of how galaxies form and evolve.

The project, called Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby Galaxies, or PHANGS, used James Webb to observe several galaxies which are similar to our own Milky Way to see how stars are forming within them.

Read more