Juno first saw the birth of dawn glowing storms at Jupiter's poles

Morning storms were first detected by Hubble's Faint Object Camera in 1994. They consist of

short-term but intense increasebrightness and expansion of Jupiter's main auroral oval—an elongated curtain of light surrounding both poles—near where the atmosphere emerges from darkness into the early morning region. Before Juno, observations of Jupiter's ultraviolet aurora only offered side views, obscuring everything going on on the night side of the planet.

This video depicts the evolution of the morning stormin the auroras of Jupiter. Images for the video were collected using data from an ultraviolet spectrograph instrument aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / UVS / ULiège.

"Observing the aurora of JupiterThe Earth does not allow you to look beyond the limb, to the night side of Jupiter's poles. The explorations of other spacecraft—Voyager, Galileo, Cassini—occurred from relatively large distances and did not fly over the poles, so they may not have seen the full picture,” explains Bertrand Bonfond , a researcher at the University of Liège in Belgium and the lead author of the study. "That's why the Juno data is a real game-changer, allowing us to better understand what's happening on the night side where dawn storms originate."

As a result of the study, scientists found thatdawn storms are born on the night side of the gas giant. As the planet rotates, the approaching dawn storm moves with it towards the daytime. There, these complex and very bright auroras grow even brighter, emitting hundreds to thousands of gigawatts of ultraviolet light into space. The jump in brightness means that morning storms are throwing at least 10 times more energy into Jupiter's upper atmosphere than typical auroras.

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