The press release of NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array have indicated that auroras near Jupiter’s north and south poles transmit high-energy X-rays. The light emitted is in the form of X-rays moreover the highest-energy light ever observed.
The new studies have enabled scientists unravel a mystery which is Why did the Ulysses mission fail to observe X-rays when it ran away prior Jupiter in 1992?
X-rays are an aspect of light, but with greatly higher energies and shorter wavelengths than the visible light which can be seen with human eyes.
It’s quite challenging for planets to generate X-rays in the range that NuSTAR detects told by Kaya Mori, an astrophysicist at Columbia University.
Our X-ray telescopes usually focus on the universe outside the @NASASolarSystem, but sometimes they make discoveries within it! 🛰️ NuSTAR recently observed the highest-energy light ever detected from Jupiter and helped solve a decades-old mystery: https://t.co/hL34uPOuj3 pic.twitter.com/FzCXQWe71s
— NASA Universe (@NASAUniverse) February 10, 2022
The scientists have observed X-rays in Earth’s auroras with much higher energies that NuSTAR saw at Jupiter. But those emissions are very pale than Jupiter’s and can just be sighted by small satellites or high-altitude balloons that get very near to the locales in the atmosphere that produce those X-rays. Likewise, observing these emissions in Jupiter’s atmosphere would expect an X-ray device near to the planet with tremendous sensitivity than those delivered by Ulysses in the 1990s.
