An artist’s illustration incorporating new Hubble observations of aurora at Jupiter; credit JAXA
Observations of Jupiter made by Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope are being analysed by Dr Sarah Badman at Lancaster University. Dr Badman from the Department of Physics is a Royal Astronomical Society Research Fellow and led the observations made by Hubble. In January 2014, Jupiter was observed by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope as well as the new Hisaki space satellite telescope operated by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The observations by the Hisaki and Hubble successfully captured explosions of Jupiter's extreme ultraviolet emission (EUV) aurora during periods when the solar wind (the constant stream of charged particles travelling away from the Sun) was very quiet. These explosions are interpreted as the 'internally-driven' type aurora, which is associated with the rotation and magnetic field of Jupiter rather than the solar wind. Dr Badman is the co-author on research in Geophysical Research Letters together with Dr Tomoki Kimura, Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. She said: "The brilliant auroral display seen on Earth during the St Patrick's Day storm was caused by a cloud of energetic particles and strong magnetic field arriving from the Sun.
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