(dr) Troy Tsubota e Michael Wong
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Jupiter has always fascinated stargazers with its colorful bands of clouds. Now, new research from a team of citizen scientists challenges the old idea that the planet’s visible clouds are formed by ammonia ice.
The new discovery was sparked by amateur astronomer Steven Hill, who demonstrated that the abundance of ammonia ea cloud top pressure in Jupiter’s atmosphere could be mapped using commercially available telescopes and some specially colored filters.
Their results surprised astronomers by revealing that the clouds are too deep in the planet’s warm atmosphere to be consistent with the hypothesis that they are ammonia ice.
According to , specialist Patrick Irwin from the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford applied Steven Hill’s analytical method to observations of Jupiter made with the instrument Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) no Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory, in Chile.
MUSE uses the power of spectroscopy – where Jupiter’s gases create telltale fingerprints in visible light at different wavelengths – to map ammonia and cloud heights in the gas giant’s atmosphere.
By simulating how light interacts with gases and clouds in a computer model, Irwin and his team discovered that the planet’s primary clouds — the ones we can see when we look through telescopes — had to be much deeper than previously thought. , in a region of higher pressure and higher temperature, sufficient for ammonia condensation.
Contrary to popular belief, these clouds are made from a different ingredient: ammonium hydrosulfide.
The truth is that previous analyzes of MUSE observations suggested a similar result, but because they were done using sophisticated and extremely complex methods that can only be conducted by a few scientific groups, the result was difficult to corroborate.
“I am surprised that such a simple method is able to probe so deeply into the atmosphere and demonstrate so clearly that the main clouds cannot be pure ammonia ice,” reacted Irwin.
“These results show that an amateur with a modern camera and special filters can open a new window into Jupiter’s atmosphere and contribute to understanding the nature of Jupiter’s long-mysterious clouds,” he concluded.
The was published in Journal of Geophysical Research – Planets.
