If you've ever seen the aurora – or Northern Lights – imagine seeing the same display but hundreds of times brighter and more energetic.
That, say planetary scientists, is what aurora displays are like on Jupiter, and the James Webb Space Telescope has captured brand new images and a video of the phenomenon.
Jupiter is the biggest planet in our Solar System, so perhaps it's unsurprising that its aurorae are hundreds of times brighter and more energetic than Earth's.
Webb's science instruments have enabled scientists to get a fresh look, revealing more about how Jupiter's aurorae behave and what causes them.
A quick aurora primer
An aurora display is created when high-energy particles from the Sun – known as the 'solar wind' – hit a planet's atmosphere.
They collide with atoms or molecules of gas near the planet's magnetic poles and generate the effect known as the Northern Lights or the Southern Lights.
Earth’s aurorae are caused by solar storms, when charged particles from the Sun enter our upper atmosphere and energise the gases, causing them to glow in colours like green, purple or red.
Jupiter's aurora additive
Jupiter's aurorae are caused not just by the Sun, but by its moon Io, too.
The planet's strong magnetic field pulls in charged particles from the solar wind, but also pulls in particles flung into space by Io.
Io is the most volcanic body in the Solar System, and it's well-known as being an active volcano world.
Io's volcanoes eject particles into space that end up in orbit around Jupiter.
Jupiter’s large, powerful magnetic field captures the charged particles from both the Sun and Io and accelerates them.
The particles slam into Jupiter's atmosphere, causing aurora.
Webb unlocks Jupiter's aurora secrets
Planetary scientists say the James Webb Space Telescope is giving them new insights into Jupiter's aurora.
The images seen here were captured with Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) on 25 December 2023 by a team of scientists led by Jonathan Nichols from the University of Leicester in the UK.
The team studied emission from 'trihydrogen cation' , which can be created by aurorae, and found that the emission is more variable than thought.
They say Webb's observations will help them learn more about how Jupiter’s upper atmosphere is heated and cooled.
"We wanted to see how quickly the auroras change, expecting them to fade in and out ponderously, perhaps over a quarter of an hour or so," says Nichols.
"Instead, we observed the whole auroral region fizzing and popping with light, sometimes varying by the second."
"What made these observations even more special is that we also took pictures simultaneously in the ultraviolet with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
"Bizarrely, the brightest light observed by Webb had no real counterpart in Hubble’s pictures. This has left us scratching our heads.
"In order to cause the combination of brightness seen by both Webb and Hubble, we need to have a combination of high quantities of very low-energy particles hitting the atmosphere, which was previously thought to be impossible. We still don’t understand how this happens."
The team now plans to study the difference between Hubble and Webb data to learn more about Jupiter's atmosphere.
And they intend to combine data with NASA's Juno mission at Jupiter to get closer to the answer.
Find out more by reading the science paper at www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58984-z
