Earth’s beautiful northern and southern lights are the result of auroras: when high-energy charged particles from the sun
hit gases in our upper atmosphere, making them glow in brilliant colors as they release energy from the collision.
Auroras occur where Earth’s
magnetic field crosses our planet’s atmosphere near the north and south poles.
While scientists have previously observed auroras on
Mars,
Jupiter,
Saturn and
Uranus, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has finally spotted them on
Neptune for the first time. The announcement is detailed in a study published Wednesday in the journal
Nature Astronomy.
If JWST “was powerful enough to see the
earliest galaxies in the universe, it’d better be powerful enough to see things like aurorae on Neptune,” study co-author
Heidi Hammel, an astronomer at the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, tells the
New York Times’ Robin George Andrews. “And by golly, it was.”
Astronomers have been searching for auroral activity on Neptune, the most distant planet from the sun, since NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by it in 1989 and picked up “tantalizing hints” of the phenomenon, per a NASA
statement.
“Neptune has always been elusive,”
James O’Donoghue, a planetary scientist at the University of Reading in England and a co-author of the new study, tells the
Associated Press’ Christina Larson. “We’ve been trying to see it again ever since [Voyager].”
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