Synching with these predictions, the 11 large-scale bright events Juno's UVS instrument has detected occurred in a region where lightning thunderstorms are known to form. The occurrence of sprites and elves at Jupiter was predicted by several previously published studies. "But on Jupiter, the upper atmosphere mostly consists of hydrogen, so they would likely appear either blue or pink." "On Earth, sprites and elves appear reddish in color due to their interaction with nitrogen in the upper atmosphere," said Giles. They, too, brighten the sky for mere milliseconds but can grow larger than sprites-up to 200 miles (320 kilometers) across on Earth. Elves (short for Emission of Light and Very Low Frequency perturbations due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources) appear as a flattened disk glowing in Earth's upper atmosphere. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRIĪlmost resembling a jellyfish, sprites feature a central blob of light (on Earth, it's 15 to 30 miles, or 24 to 48 kilometers, across), with long tendrils extending both down toward the ground and upward. The south pole of Jupiter and a potential transient luminous event - a bright, unpredictable, and extremely brief flash of light - is seen in this annotated image of data acquired on April 10, 2020, from Juno's UVS instrument. On Earth, they occur up to 60 miles (97 kilometers) above intense, towering thunderstorms and brighten a region of the sky tens of miles across, yet last only a few milliseconds (a fraction of the time it takes you to blink an eye). Named after a mischievous, quick-witted character in English folklore, sprites are transient luminous events triggered by lightning discharges from thunderstorms far below. The more our team looked into it, the more we realized Juno may have detected a TLE on Jupiter." "But we discovered UVS images that not only showed Jovian aurora, but also a bright flash of UV light over in the corner where it wasn't supposed to be. "UVS was designed to characterize Jupiter's beautiful northern and southern lights," said Giles, a Juno scientist and the lead author of the paper. Then, in the summer of 2019, researchers working with data from Juno's ultraviolet spectrograph instrument (UVS) discovered something unexpected: a bright, narrow streak of ultraviolet emission that disappeared in a flash. Scientists predicted these bright, superfast flashes of light should also be present in Jupiter's immense roiling atmosphere, but their existence remained theoretical.
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