Jupiter’s lightning is 100 times stronger than Earth’s bolts
All it takes is a close encounter with love at first sight to fully feel its power. With approximately 1 gigaJoule of energy, a single electrical discharge during a thunderstorm is more than enough to tear up a tree, destroy an entire city’s energy grid, or kill an unfortunate passerby. But according to recent observations of the planet Jupiter, our largest neighbor in the solar system exhibits lightning so intense that Earth’s lightning strikes resemble tiny static shocks.
According to a study recently published in the journal AGU progressthe gas giant regularly sees lightning bolts up to 100 times more powerful than those seen here on planet Earth. Although Jupiter’s composition and atmosphere share very little in common with our home planet, astronomers say that analyzing these distant electrical discharges could help us better understand the lightning experienced on Earth.
Hundreds of millions of lightning strikes occur around Earth each year, but apart from their underlying mechanisms, meteorologists still know very little about natural phenomena. Only in recent years have scientists discovered the peculiar millisecond-long variations in lightning, known as transient light events, that occur in upper atmospheres. Likewise, we still have much to learn about Jupiter’s storms, but at least one thing is abundantly clear: they are very, very big. Some Jovian weather events are larger than Earth itself and can last for centuries. For example, the planet’s famous Great Red Spot is more than 10,000 miles wide, experiences 200 mph winds, and has been churning for more than 200 Earth years. All the while, he and his storm brothers produced countless lightning bolts.
Although almost every other spacecraft flying by Jupiter spotted the electrical explosions, they were mostly captured on the night side of the planet and were particularly powerful. This meant that researchers didn’t know whether Jupiter was constantly producing huge flashes of lightning, or whether it was also seeing relatively weaker ones. However, astronomers using NASA’s Juno spacecraft are getting their best glimpses of Jupiter yet. Juno began orbiting the gas giant in 2016, and the probe regularly scans the atmosphere using equipment such as its microwave radiometer. This instrument can report radio emissions from lightning.
Jupiter’s storms regularly form in belts that surround the planet, which can make it difficult to match lightning to specific atmospheric events. But in 2021 and 2022, a quiet period along the northern equatorial belt allowed researchers to focus on individual storms with the help of Juno, the Hubble Space Telescope and volunteer citizen scientists.
“Because we had a specific location, we were able to just say, ‘OK, we know where it is. We measure power directly,’” explained Michael Wong, co-author of the study and a planetary scientist at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory.
The results showed a much more varied and dynamic weather spectrum. During four separate passes over storms, Juno recorded microwave static from lightning about three times per second. In one case, the spacecraft reported 206 pulses. Wong’s team analyzed 613 microwave bursts and found that their power ranged from a typical terrestrial lightning strike to strikes at least 100 times more powerful than a standard broadcast. Other calculations suggest that lightning strikes above Jupiter contain between 500 and 10,000 times more energy than lightning strikes on Earth.
Further study is needed to fully understand Jupiter’s storms, but there are already clues that could help explain how they become so powerful. One theory is based on the planet’s atmospheric composition. Unlike Earth’s nitrogen-rich atmosphere, Jupiter’s clouds are made mostly of hydrogen. Because hydrogen is much heavier than nitrogen, the moist air in a gas giant storm requires much more energy to rise. But once it’s do Arrive at the top of the atmosphere, its discharges are immense.
“This is where the details start to get exciting, where one might ask, ‘Could the key difference be the hydrogen and nitrogen atmospheres, or could it be that the storms are higher up on Jupiter and therefore the distances involved are greater?'” Wong explained.
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