NASA space probe sees northern lights on Jupiter

If you thought the Northern Lights were a rare sight for us Earthlings, you may want to reconsider.

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

The Northern Lights here on Earth are the result of charged particles from the sun interacting with Earth’s magnetosphere to create that glow we see. There’s a continuous ring of that light around the Earth’s poles – but we can’t see it here in Michigan until a solar burst occurs that accelerates the flow of particles and pushes that ring south.

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

What’s especially interesting is that while Earth’s aurorae are caused by charged particles entering the solar wind here, on Jupiter, those charged particles come from the volcanically active moon Io – the most volcanically active world in the solar system, according to to NASA.

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Previous missions didn’t really give a good view of the Jovian aurorae, but Juno is a spacecraft orbiting a pole, so these images are our first true deep dive into the planet’s northern lights. New revelations on Jupiter, combined with the revelations recently discovered on Mars, have made for an interesting year of space exploration so far!

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