Magnetosphere Mapping of Jupiter’s Polar Auroral Bright Spot

This work presents the study of presents the study of polar bright spots, unstable and ambiguous features in Jupiter’s polar aurora. Images were taken by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) using the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) instrument. We analyzed the brightness and locations of the bright spots to study their variability. Here we present eight bright spots which were clearly seen in Jupiter’s aurora images taking during May-June 2007. The latitude and longitude locations of bright spots were found to be colocated to within 10 degrees. In most cases, these features evolve from an undetermined shape into a well confined spots, before they eventually fade into the background emission. The counterpart of these bright spots in Jupiter's magnetosphere were determined using flux equivalent method proposed by Vogt et al. (2011 and 2015) and magnetic field tracing method, based on several magnetic models and direct observations. We find that the mapped locations in magnetosphere correspond to distances larger than ~70 Jovian radii from Jupiter with local time mostly near noon. The results suggest that the bright spots can be related with the polar cusp process, which remain poorly understood.