The planet Jupiter returns to the center of the world's attention after a new incredible discovery stunned the researchers from all over the world, and this in the conditions where the attention seemed to be directed towards its moons. More precisely, those from NASA managed to unravel a new mystery that they observed on the planet Jupiter, but for which they had no explanation until now, even though it most certainly had a great impact on evolution the planet.
The planet Jupiter is at a distance 5 times greater from the sun compared to the Earth, and scientists have struggled for over 5 decades to find out why the planet's atmosphere registers such high temperatures. Normally, scientists would have expected that the atmosphere on the planet Jupiter would record temperatures of minus 73 degrees Celsius, but in reality temperatures of up to 426 degrees Celsius are recorded there.
Planet Jupiter: Astounding Discovery That Astonishes Researchers
The planet Jupiter has not yet explained this major discrepancy between what scientists thought should happen and what is actually happening on the cosmic body. Now NASA researchers say that the auroras that the planet Jupiter generates are responsible for the extremely high heating of the atmosphere of the cosmic body, something that came as a very big surprise to them, considering the great distance of the planet from the sun.
"We found that Jupiter's intense aurora, the strongest in the solar system, is responsible for heating the planet's entire atmosphere to surprisingly high temperatures. We also revealed a strange localized region of heating far from the aurora – a long bar of heating unlike anything we've seen before. While we can't be sure what this feature is, I'm convinced it's a heat wave flowing equatorward from the aurora. It was pure luck that we caught this potential heat event. If we had observed Jupiter on a different night, when the pressure of the solar wind had not recently increased, we would have missed it!”
The entire atmosphere of the planet Jupiter is heated by the way the wind moves in its atmosphere, the superheated one in the aurora regions is distributed between the poles and increases the temperatures in the atmosphere to huge values. Scientists actually believed that those hot winds above the auroras would stay in their region, blocked there by the equatorial winds from the planet Jupiter, the reality is completely different, as NASA researchers have observed.
Planet Jupiter will continue to be monitored by scientists, but based on what has been discovered so far, it seems that this 5 decades old mystery has been solved.
