As per the research is done, Jupiter has got profoundly different kind of magnetic field compared to all other known planets. Essentially, it has got two magnetic south poles instead of having just one, a new Nature study has found.
Scientists have done research by analyzing Jupiter with the help of Juno spacecraft of NASA which landed the planet in 2016. The probe’s orbit takes it over both Jupiter’s poles and flies a mere 4,000 kilometers above its surface by mapping Jupiter’s magnetic field. The magnetic field can be termed as the strongest planetary magnetic field in the solar system with unprecedented detail.
“We now have a close-up view of Jupiter’s magnetic field, almost as good as our knowledge of the Earth’s field, which took hundreds of years to work out,” said planetary scientist Chris Jones at the University of Leeds in England. “This gives us a chance to work out what is really going on deep inside a planet other than the Earth.”
Earlier to Juno, “our best maps of Jupiter’s field closely resembled Earth’s,” said Kimberly Moore, a planetary scientist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. However, these new findings clearly suggest that the magnetic field of the Jupiter is radically different from that of Earth. “We were baffled at first since the field Juno was showing us was nothing like we expected,” she noted.
One method to give a picture for the magnetic field of the planet is to color the planet red where the from the magnetic flux coming out from the planet and blue for the magnetic flux returns of the planet. For Earth, if we apply the color scheme results in Earth being colored very deeply red near its north pole and deeply blue near its south pole.
The magnetic field of the Jupiter is very much different when compared. And if we were to use our color scheme again, Jupiter is colored deeply in red in a band near the south pole of it but has got deeply two spots, one of them being at the south pole and another nicknamed as the “Great Blue Spot” which is near its equator.
“The magnetic field of Jupiter was thought to be like the Earth’s from our rather fuzzy previous view — now we can see it’s really different,” said Jones.
Moreover, on Earth, the planets magnetic field that does not favor one pole over the other are actually spread in an even way out in the area between the poles and can be said that it lacks colors.
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