Event Details

Dynamics in Jupiter’s FUV Aurora

The planet Jupiter has recently received a significant amount of attention owing to the arrival of the Juno spacecraft in July 2016. In this presentation we discuss some results from a programme of Hubble Space Telescope observations of Jupiter’s FUV auroras obtained during 2016, as the spacecraft approached and entered into orbit around the planet. We show that the response of the auroras to changes in the conditions in the interplanetary medium is more complex that originally thought. We will also discuss two new phenomena discovered in these data, i.e. pulsating aurora located on the main emission, which we suggest is indicative of a ULF mode trapped in the low density cavity between the ionosphere and the magnetosphere; and longitudinal variations in the location of the Ganymede auroral footprint, which possible indicate changes in the ambient plasma density near Ganymede.