NASA spacecraft observes northern lights on Jupiter

If you thought the northern lights were a rare sight for us earthlings, you might want to think again.

Those beautiful colors, the most visible in the Arctic and Antarctic, are not only found on Earth: Jupiter also has northern lights.

Boreal light here on Earth results from solar-charged particles that interact with the Earth’s magnetosphere to create that glow we see. There is a continuous ring of light around the earth’s poles – but we can’t see it here in Michigan until a solar flare occurs and accelerates the flow of particles, pushing that ring south.

In the video above, you can see how Jupiter’s auroral ring is almost identical to the ring near one of the Earth’s poles, as viewed by NASA’s Juno spacecraft.

What is particularly interesting is that although the auroras of the Earth are caused by charged particles coming here in the solar wind, on Jupiter, those charged particles come from its active volcanic moon, Io – which is the most volcanic active world in the solar system, according to NASA.

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Previous missions didn’t really offer a good view of the Jovian auroras, but Juno is a spacecraft orbiting the polar, so these images are our first deep dive into the northern light of the planet. The new revelations on Jupiter, combined with those recently discovered on Mars, have so far made for an exciting year of space exploration!

Related: NASA uses the Navajo language to name points of interest on Mars