Ionospheric irregularities at Jupiter observed by JWST

Creators: Melin, Henrik; O'Donoghue, J.; Moore, L.; Stallard, T. S.; Fletcher, L. N.; Roman, M. T.; Harkett, J.; King, O. R. T.; Thomas, E. M.; Wang, R.; Tiranti, P. I.; Knowles, K. L.; de Pater, I.; Fouchet, T.; Fry, P. H.; Wong, M. H.; Holler, B. J.; Hueso, R.; James, M. K.; Orton, G. S.; Mura, A.; Sánchez-Lavega, A.; Lellouch, E.; de Kleer, K.¹; Showalter, M. R.

1. California Institute of Technology

Abstract

Jupiter’s upper atmosphere is composed of a neutral thermosphere and charged ionosphere. In the latter, the dominant molecular ion H₃⁺ emits in the near-infrared, allowing for the remote exploration of the physical properties of the upper atmosphere. However, the Jovian low-latitude ionosphere remains largely unexplored because H₃⁺ emissions from this region are faint and spectrally entangled with bright neutral species, such as CH₄. Here, we present James Webb Space Telescope H₃⁺ observations of Jupiter’s low-latitude ionosphere in the region of the Great Red Spot, showing unexpected small-scale intensity features such as arcs, bands and spots. Our observations may imply that the low-latitude ionosphere of Jupiter is strongly coupled to the lower atmosphere via gravity waves that superimpose to produce this complex and intricate morphology.

Copyright and License

© The Author(s) 2024. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Acknowledgement

H.M. was supported by the STFC James Webb Fellowship (ST/W001527/1) at the University of Leicester, UK. J.O’D. was supported by the STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellowship ST/X003426/1 at the University of Reading. I.d.P., P.M.F., M.R.S. and M.H.W. are in part supported by the Space Telescope Science Institute grant no. JWST-ERS-01373. T.S.S. was supported by an STFC Consolidated Grant (ST/Y005325/1) at the Northumbria University, UK. L.M. acknowledges support by NASA grant no. 80NSSC20K1045 issued through the Solar System Workings Program. L.N.F. was supported by a European Research Council Consolidator Grant under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, grant agreement 723890 at the University of Leicester. R.H. and A.S.L. were supported by grant no. PID2019-109467GB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ and were also supported by Grupos Gobierno Vasco IT1742-22. K.L.K. was supported by a Northumbria University Research Studentship. P.I.T., J.H. and E.M.T. were supported by STFC studentships at the University of Leicester. G.S.O. was supported at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). For the purpose of open access, the authors have applied a creative commons attribution (CC BY) licence to any author-accepted manuscript version arising.

Contributions

H.M. led the project, performed the data analysis, devised the fitting procedures and wrote the manuscript. J.O’D., L.M., T.S.S., P.I.T., E.T. and R.W. provided context and contributed to the interpretation of the H₃⁺ emissions. L.N.F., R.H., A.S.L. and G.S.O. provided the context for the troposphere and stratosphere. K.K. provided the low-latitude observations of ref. ⁴. M.T.R., J.H. and O.R.T.K. worked on the post-pipeline reduction of the NIRSpec IFU data. M.W., K.d.K., E.L., A.M. and M.R.S. designed and planned the observations. I.d.P. and T.F. led the Jupiter ERS programme. P.F. provided validation of the NIRSpec flux calibration. R.H. provided guidance on the JWST Near Infrared Camera observations. B.H. helped with the JWST calibration pipeline. M.K.J. developed the JupiterMag tool to model Jupiter’s magnetic field and perform field-line tracing. All authors reviewed and edited the paper.

Data Availability

JWST data used in this study were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes at the Space Telescope Science Institute (https://archive.stsci.edu/), which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-03127 for the JWST. JWST NIRSpec ERS #1373 observations of Jupiter’s GRS used here are available via MAST at https://doi.org/10.17909/yedm-f607.

Code Availability

The open source Python H₃⁺ fitting code h3ppy is available at https://github.com/henrikmelin/h3ppy. The JupiterMag field-line tracing code is available at https://github.com/mattkjames7/JupiterMag. All remaining code used for this analysis of the JWST data can be found at https://github.com/henrikmelin/jupiter-grs-h3p.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare no competing interests.

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Resource type: Journal Article
Publisher: Nature Publishing Group
Published in: Nature Astronomy, ISSN: 2397-3366.
Languages: English