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Eccentric Explorer

Jupiter's Aurora

Updated: May 29, 2021


The Hubble Telescope captures Jupiter's auroras...

Never neglect your curiosity...


Jupiter's Magnetosphere:


Jupiter's internal magnetic field prevents the solar wind, a stream of ionised particles emitted by the Sun, from interacting directly with its atmosphere, and instead diverts it away from the planet, effectively creating a cavity in the solar wind flow, called a magnetosphere, composed of a plasma different from that of the solar wind. The Jovian magnetosphere is so large that the Sun and its visible corona would fit inside it with room to spare. If one could see it from Earth, it would appear five times larger than the full moon in the sky despite being nearly 1,700 times farther away. As with the Earth's magnetosphere, the boundary separating the denser and colder solar wind's plasma from the hotter and less dense one within Jupiter's magnetosphere is called the magnetopause. The distance from the magnetopause to the center of the planet is from 45 to 100 RJ (where RJ=71,492 km is the radius of Jupiter) at the subsolar point—the unfixed point on the surface at which the Sun would appear directly overhead to an observer. The position of the magnetopause depends on the pressure exerted by the solar wind, which in turn depends on solar activity. In front of the magnetopause (at a distance from 80 to 130 RJ from the planet's center) lies the bow shock, a wake-like disturbance in the solar wind caused by its collision with the magnetosphere. The region between the bow shock and magnetopause is called the magnetosheath...


Jupiter's magnetosphere is traditionally divided into three parts: the inner, middle and outer magnetosphere. The inner magnetosphere is located at distances closer than 10 RJ from the planet. The magnetic field within it remains approximately dipole, because contributions from the currents flowing in the magnetospheric equatorial plasma sheet are small. In the middle (between 10 and 40 RJ) and outer (further than 40 RJ) magnetospheres, the magnetic field is not a dipole, and is seriously disturbed by its interaction with the plasma sheet...

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