Journal article
An intense narrow equatorial jet in Jupiter's lower stratosphere observed by JWST
- Abstract:
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The atmosphere of Jupiter has east–west zonal jets that alternate as a function of latitude as tracked by cloud motions at tropospheric levels. Above and below the cold tropopause at ~100 mbar, the equatorial atmosphere is covered by hazes at levels where thermal infrared observations used to characterize the dynamics of the stratosphere lose part of their sensitivity. James Webb Space Telescope observations of Jupiter in July 2022 show these hazes in higher detail than ever before and reveal the presence of an intense (140 m s−1) equatorial jet at 100–200 mbar (70 m s−1 faster than the zonal winds at the cloud level) that is confined to ±3° of the equator and is located below stratospheric thermal oscillations that extend at least from 0.1 to 40 mbar and repeat in multiyear cycles. This suggests that the new jet is a deep part of Jupiter’s Equatorial Stratospheric Oscillation and may therefore vary in strength over time.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 3.4MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41550-023-02099-2
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Nature Astronomy More from this journal
- Publication date:
- 2023-10-19
- Acceptance date:
- 2023-09-11
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2397-3366
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1556052
- Local pid:
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pubs:1556052
- Deposit date:
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2023-11-29
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Hueso et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2023
- Rights statement:
- Copyright © 2023, The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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