Jupiter’s 3,400km wide thunderstorm
Sean R. Blue Harbor, et al. 2025
An enraged for weeks in the atmosphere of Jupiter, the thunderstorm was accidentally captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft, giving astronomers the most detailed look in the storm of the gas giant.
On November 29, 2021, Junho passed directly through a 3,400-kilometer thunderstorm that had been tracked by astronomers on Earth since it began nearly two weeks ago. Juno’s close approach, about 5,700 km above the storm, is Shawn Bruce Harbor Michigan University of Technology and his colleagues can analyze data from three instruments: Juno, with Visible, microwave and infrared light.
“We haven’t flew another Jupiter thunderstorm with this level of detail,” Bruce Harbor says. “Microwave radiometers and visible cameras need to be able to clean the storm almost above to get this really good data. We haven’t done it yet, and we may not… this was very coincidence.”
One of the inexplicable features of the storm was its persistence, he says. “All numerical models so far have tried to simulate a single thunderstorm, not weeks, but hours,” Bruce Harbor says, which could be explained by an unusually strong concentration of ammonia and steam humidity and a relative lack of nearby areas. This is similar to thunderstorms on Earth, formed and sustained by a strong gradient of water vapor.
Ammonia-rich storms can produce “mash balls” like rainy water and ammonia rain in the atmosphere below, he says.
They also found that the storm is relatively unconnected with deeper deeper features in the atmosphere of Jupiter, unlike some of its more permanent features, such as its stunning red spots, and self-contained in a meteorological layer similar to Earth’s storms. “We’re beginning to get ideas about how thunderstorm mechanics works in a hydrogen-dominated atmosphere,” says Blue Harbor. “We’re learning to be more like Earth than we’d thought before.”
topic:
