NASA detected the most energetic light ever seen on Jupiter, marking the end of the road for 30 years of Jupiter mystery. Using NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) space observatory, researchers said the light, which is X-ray radiation, is also the highest-energy light ever seen on a planet other than Earth.
NASA couldn’t understand why it didn’t see X-rays when Jupiter flew past the planet on the Ulysses solar study mission in 1992. But the high-energy light uncovered in the new study helped solve that mystery.
What was the 30-year-old Jupiter mystery?
This isn’t the first time X-rays have been seen on Jupiter: NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton observatory have previously observed low-energy X-rays from auroras on the giant planet. he got his chance.
Auroras at Jupiter’s north and south poles are created by ions from the planet’s volcanic moon Io that are accelerated towards the poles by the planet’s magnetic field. The ions interact with Jupiter’s atmosphere and create aurora light shows. Reaching Jupiter in 2016, NASA’s Juno spacecraft found that electrons from Io were also interacting with the planet’s magnetic field.
Scientists suspect that these electrons from Io could create X-rays even more powerful than the planet’s auroras. With their NuSTAR observations, the researchers confirmed for the first time that Io’s electrons do indeed create high-energy X-rays.
Launched into space in 2012, NuSTAR is a space-based X-ray telescope that studies the cosmos in high-energy X-rays. “It’s quite difficult for planets to produce X-rays in the range detected by NuSTAR,” said Kaya Mori, an astrophysicist at Columbia University and lead author of the study. he said and continued:
“But Jupiter has a tremendous magnetic field and it spins very fast. These two features mean that the planet’s magnetosphere acts like a giant particle accelerator, enabling higher energy emissions.”
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