Dominant Trends in Jupiter's H3+ Northern Aurora II: Magnetospheric Mapping

Tom S. Stallard*, Katie L. Knowles, Henrik Melin, Ruoyan Wang, Emma M. Thomas, Luke Moore, James O'Donoghue, Rosie E. Johnson, Steve Miller, John C. Coxon

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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Abstract

Jupiter's auroral regions have previously been defined by broad-scale auroral structures, but these are typically obscured by the wide array of temporal variability observed at timescales between minutes and days, making it difficult to understand the underlying magnetospheric biases driving these brightness differences. Here, we follow on from an initial study of Jupiter's aurora, again utilizing a data set of (Formula presented.) 13,000 (Formula presented.) images of Jupiter mapped into latitude, longitude and local time, smoothed over tens of hours of integration and many days of observing. Having removed correlations between brightness and both magnetic field and planetary local time identified in the first study, we examine morphological changes in emission with both planetary and magnetic local time. We reveal that the (Formula presented.) main auroral emission is enhanced by a factor of three in the region mapping into the dusk magnetosphere. An additional strong auroral darkening is observed near noon, aligned with previous ultraviolet observations of an auroral discontinuity in this region, though this rotates duskward slightly in magnetic local time, as the ionospheric source mapping to this region moves duskward. The polar aurora contrasts with this strongly, showing brightness enhancement when the auroral pole points toward the dawn and dusk limbs. It also shows that the Dark region is fixed in local time, close to the dawnward edge of the polar region, while the Swirl region appears to match well with predictions from recent MHD models when the magnetic pole points toward dawn, but changes significantly at other magnetic pole directions.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere2025JA034076
Number of pages24
JournalJournal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics
Volume130
Issue number10
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 01 Oct 2025

Keywords

  • Jupiter
  • aurora
  • local time
  • magnetosphere
  • magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling
  • infrared
  • IO FLUX TUBE
  • JOVIAN AURORA
  • INFRARED OBSERVATIONS
  • MAGNETIC-FIELD
  • IONOSPHERE
  • ULTRAVIOLET
  • POWERFUL
  • EMISSION
  • FLOWS
  • MODEL

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