Webb Telescope will investigate what produces auroras on Saturn and Uranus

MADRID (EUROPA PRESS) -A team of astronomers led by the University of Leicester will use the James Webb Space Telescope to discover what is causing the mysterious northern lights of Saturn and Uranus.

As on Earth, both planets have their own northern lights, also known as auroral emissions. These auroras are caused on Earth by highly energetic charged particles, which are funneled downward and collide with the atmosphere through the planet’s magnetic field lines.

Dr James O’Donoghue, a planetary scientist at the University of Reading, will study Saturn’s aurora as a co-investigator on the study. “This is an extremely rare opportunity to use the most powerful and complex telescope ever launched into space. We will investigate Saturn’s own version of the northern lights, which appear to be caused by winds flowing in what looks like a figure of eight. We don’t know what is causing these winds, but we suspect that behind them there could be hot spots in the upper atmosphere.

“We will use the James Webb Space Telescope to map temperatures in Saturn’s northern lights and discover how the climate is creating this spectacular light show,” he said in a statement.

The team, led by Dr Henrik Melin from the University of Leicester’s School of Physics and Astronomy, will work on two projects. The first project for which Dr. Melin’s own team will use the JWST will observe the aurora of Uranus, about which very little is known. The conduit of the auroral currents is the magnetic field, which on Uranus is full of strange complexity.

The project will capture images over the course of a single day of Uranus, or one full rotation of the planet, in the early months of 2025. This way, the team will be able to map auroral emissions over a full rotation of the field. magnetic Uranus to Answer your key question: do the emissions occur through interaction with the solar wind (like Earth), or are there internal sources within the system (like Jupiter), or somewhere in between (like Saturn) ?

For the second project, led by Professor Luke Moore at Boston University’s Center for Space Physics, astronomers will observe Saturn’s northern auroral region for an entire Saturnian day, 10.6 hours long, to observe changes temperature of this region as the planet rotates. . By revealing the atmospheric energies of auroras for the first time, we will be able to search for a source of the aurora driven by Saturn’s atmosphere and thus contextualize this new process more broadly, allowing us to understand whether the process is important on Earth, on other planets in the system solar, and within astrophysical objects throughout the universe.

Both projects will use the JWST NIRSpec (Near Infrared Spectrograph) instrument, so precise that it could detect the infrared signature of a lit match on the Moon.