The polar region of Jupiter’s aurora : barcode noise, conjugate flares and more...

Juno’s unprecedented polar orbits around Jupiter allow for unique observations of the polar aurorae and related phenomena. Here we make use of Juno-UVS, the UV imaging spectrograph operating in the 60-200 nm range, to explore the polar physics in two very different ways. In the first part of this presentation, we will analyze the rapid variations of the background noise caused by >10MeV electrons penetrating the instrument. In UV images, this rapidly varying signal takes the form of a barcode-like pattern. We will discuss the mapping, the altitude and the characteristic timescale of the “barcode events” in order to constrain the mechanisms giving rise to them. In the second part, we will compare simultaneous observations of the aurorae from the two hemispheres. One dataset comes from Juno-UVS while the other comes from the Hubble Space Telescope STIS instrument. We will show that most auroral features in one hemisphere have a clear counterpart in the other one. Among other examples, we will show evidence of conjugate flares in the active region of the two hemispheres. However, other strong brightness enhancements only show up in one hemisphere, without any echo in the other one.