The Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) led a team that discovered that NASA’s Juno spacecraft frequently encounters enormous swirling waves at the boundary between Jupiter’s magnetosphere and the solar wind. The waves are a significant cycle for moving energy and mass from the sun-based breeze, a flood of charged particles radiated by the sun, to planetary space conditions.
These phenomena occur when a significant difference in velocity forms across the boundary between two regions in space, as noted by Jake Montgomery, a doctoral student in the joint space physics program between UTSA and SwRI. At the point where a planet’s magnetic field and the solar wind meet, known as the magnetopause, this may result in a swirling wave or vortex. Although these Kelvin-Helmholtz waves cannot be seen with the naked eye, they can be observed by instruments in space through plasma and magnetic fields. Plasma—aa principal condition of issue comprised of charged particles, particles, and electrons—iis omnipresent across the universe.
“Kelvin-Helmholtz hazards are a basic actual cycle that happens when sun-powered and heavenly breezes interface with planetary attractive fields across our nearby planet group and all through the universe,” Montgomery said. “Juno noticed these waves during a large number of its circles, giving decisive proof that Kelvin-Helmholtz dangers assume a functioning part in the connection between the sun-based breeze and Jupiter.”
“In our solar system and throughout the cosmos, Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities are a fundamental physical phenomena that happen when solar and stellar winds interact with planetary magnetic fields.”
Jake Montgomery, a doctoral student in the joint space physics program between UTSA and SwRI,
Montgomery is the lead creator of a review distributed in Geophysical Exploration Letters that utilizes information from numerous Juno instruments, including its magnetometer and the SwRI-fabricated Jovian Auroral Circulations Examination (JADE).
“Juno’s broad time close to Jupiter’s magnetopause has empowered point-by-point perceptions of peculiarities like Kelvin-Helmholtz dangers around here,” said Dr. Robert Ebert, a staff researcher at SwRI who likewise fills in as an adjoint teacher at UTSA. “This sun-based breeze communication is significant as it can move plasma and energy across the magnetopause into Jupiter’s magnetosphere, driving action inside that framework.”
More information: J. Montgomery et al, Investigating the Occurrence of Kelvin‐Helmholtz Instabilities at Jupiter’s Dawn Magnetopause, Geophysical Research Letters (2023). DOI: 10.1029/2023GL102921
