Polar projections of the UV aurora showing four phases of a Jovian dawn storm
Polar projections of the UV aurora showing four phases of a Jovian dawn storm: 1) the short-lived polar midnight spots in the auroral oval, 2) the formation of irregularities on the main emission pre-dawn part, 3) the expansion phase, with two arcs splitting and 4) the injection signatures in the outer auroral zone emission. The first three images are based on data from the Juno-UVS instrument and the fourth one comes from Hubble Space Telescope observations carried out to support Juno. These phases appear to correspond to nightside tail reconnection, plasma instabilities, current disruption/dipolarization in the middle magnetosphere and to flux tube interchange. Credit: Bonfond et al. [2021], Figure 5, top 4 panels
Source: AGU Advances

Bonfond et al. [2021] are the first to provide a global description of dawn storms in Jupiter’s aurorae, from their initiation to their end. Their work utilizes comparative planetology, where the authors have compared their observations at Jupiter to observations at Earth. They show that Jupiter’s corotation-dominated magnetosphere has auroral features which combine effects of corotation and solar wind driven tail substorm dipolarization, mapping to ionospheric features visible both by JUNO spacecraft imaging and by the Hubble Space Telescope. This type of study helps us probe and better understand physical processes that affect Earth directly.

Citation: Bonfond, B., Yao, Z., Gladstone, R. et al. [2021]. Are Dawn Storms Jupiter’s auroral substorms? AGU Advances, 1, e2020AV000275. https://doi.org/10.1029/2020AV000275

—Mary Hudson, Editor, AGU Advances

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