Discovery of pulsed polar flares in the Jovian aurorae

The most active part of the aurora at Jupiter is certainly the polar region, i.e. the emissions located poleward of the main auroral oval. This region is known to occasionally show localized but dramatic enhancements of its brightness, referred to as polar flares. These emissions have been associated with the polar cusp, based on their location in the polar cap. In summer 2009, right after the refurbishment of the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph camera, the Hubble Space Telescope acquired the longest high-time resolution sequence ever of images of the Jovian aurora. We report the first observations of a quasi-periodicity in the occurrence of these flares, with a timescale of ~2-3 minutes. By using a magnetic flux mapping model, we show that these features originate from a region located at a radial distance ranging from 80 to 100 Jovian radii and local times between 10:00 and 15:00. As a consequence, by analogy with similar behaviors observed in the Earth aurora, we suggest that these emissions could be attributed to pulsed reconnections in the dayside magnetopause.