Lightning crackles in a stepwise fashion on both worlds ⬇️
. The new observations show that despite the two planets being polar opposites in their sizes and structures — our rocky planet is much smaller than Jupiter and has a solid surface, which the gas giant lacks — both host the same kind of electrical storms.On Earth, lightning originates inside turbulent clouds, whose upward winds lift water droplets and freeze them into ice, while downward winds push those frigid blobs back to the bottom of the clouds.
"It was not clear if such stepping process also occurs in Jovian clouds," Ivana Kolmašová, a senior research scientist at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague and a lead author of the new study, told Space.com.Voyager 2 , Galileo and Cassini — did not have instruments sensitive enough to capture the radio signals in granular detail. The Waves instrument onboard Juno, however, collected 10 times more radio emissions than its predecessors. It did so by picking up lightning signals separated by as close as one millisecond, which revealed step-like behavior in which air in Jovian clouds is being charged up and forming lightning — the same way it does on Earth.
"The most challenging and also the most time-consuming part of the work was the search for lightning signals in the records of the Waves instrument," Kolmašová said. On Jupiter, one such step of lightning could span anywhere between several hundred to a few thousand meters long, although it is hard to confirm with existing Juno data, Kolmašová and her team wrote in the new study.
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