Original link from NASA
In this view of a vortex near Jupiter’s north pole, NASA’s Juno mission observed the glow from a bolt of lightning. On Earth, lightning bolts originate from water clouds, and happen most frequently near the equator, while on Jupiter lightning likely also occurs in clouds containing an ammonia-water solution, and can be seen most often near the poles.
In the coming months, Juno’s orbits will repeatedly take it close to Jupiter as the spacecraft passes over the giant planet’s night side, which will provide even more opportunities for Juno’s suite of science instruments to catch lightning in the act.
Juno captured this view as Juno completed its 31st close flyby of Jupiter on Dec. 30, 2020. In 2022, Citizen scientist Kevin M. Gill processed the image from raw data from the JunoCam instrument aboard the spacecraft. At the time the raw image was taken, Juno was about 19,900 miles (32,000 kilometers) above Jupiter’s cloud tops, at a latitude of about 78 degrees as it approached the planet.
JunoCam’s raw images are available for the public to peruse and process into image products at https://missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/processing. More information about NASA citizen science can be found at https://science.nasa.gov/citizenscience and https://www.nasa.gov/solve/opportunities/citizenscience.
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Jupiter is awesome in the original “inspiring awe” sense. The star that never was, possibly the first planet to form, and hugely influential in how the solar system turned out.
Jupiter throws large asteroids out of our solar system and has probably protected life on earth many many times.
Ehh, don’t mean to be that guy, but Jupiter is pretty far from being a brown dwarf, and I think all the planets formed at a similar time from proto-planetary dust and gas from the Sun’s accretion disk. Still an absolute titan of a planet though! Did you know that the Galilean moons have stabilized into a perfect 1:2:4 orbital period?
