Research team identifies giant swirling waves at the edge of Jupiter’s magnetosphere

A workforce led by Southwest Analysis Institute (SwRI) and The College of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) has discovered that NASA’s Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter steadily encounters large swirling waves on the boundary between the solar wind and Jupiter’s magnetosphere. The waves are an necessary course of for transferring vitality and mass from the solar wind, a stream of charged particles emitted by the sun, to planetary space environments.

Jake Montgomery, a doctoral pupil within the joint space physics program between UTSA and SwRI, famous that these phenomena happen when a big distinction in velocity kinds throughout the boundary between two areas in space. This may create a swirling wave, or vortex, on the interface that separates a planet’s magnetic field and the solar wind, often called the magnetopause. These Kelvin-Helmholtz waves usually are not seen to the naked eye however will be detected via instrument observations of plasma and magnetic fields in space. Plasma—a elementary state of matter made up of charged particles, ions and electrons—is ubiquitous throughout the universe.

“Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities are a elementary bodily course of that happens when solar and stellar winds work together with planetary magnetic fields throughout our solar system and all through the universe,” Montgomery mentioned. “Juno noticed these waves throughout a lot of its orbits, offering conclusive proof that Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities play an lively position within the interplay between the solar wind and Jupiter.”

Montgomery is the lead creator of a examine printed in Geophysical Analysis Letters that makes use of information from a number of Juno devices, together with its magnetometer and the SwRI-built Jovian Auroral Distributions Experiment (JADE).

“Juno’s in depth time close to Jupiter’s magnetopause has enabled detailed observations of phenomena equivalent to Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities on this area,” mentioned Dr. Robert Ebert, a employees scientist at SwRI who additionally serves as an adjoint professor at UTSA. “This solar wind interplay is necessary as it could actually transport plasma and vitality throughout the magnetopause, into Jupiter’s magnetosphere, driving exercise inside that system.”