There's Something Very Unusual About Jupiter's Auroras

NASA has just released stunning new images of auroras on Jupiter — and they're bigger and hundreds of times brighter than the northern lights on our puny world.

The spectacular snapshots were captured by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, using its powerful infrared instruments. And the findings, published in a new study in the journal Nature Communications, are already providing astronomers with surprising new details about the gas planet's atmosphere.

"It just blew me away!" lead author Jonathan Nichols, an astronomer from the University of Leicester in the UK, said in a statement about the work. "We wanted to see how quickly the auroras change, expecting them to fade in and out ponderously, perhaps over a quarter of an hour or so. Instead, we observed the whole auroral region fizzing and popping with light, sometimes varying by the second."

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