NASA space probe sees northern lights on Jupiter

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

Those beautiful colors that are most visible in the Arctic and Antarctic region do not only occur on earth: Jupiter also has northern lights.

Northern lights here on earth are the result of charged particles from the sun that interact with the earth’s magnetosphere to create the glow we see. There’s a continuous ring of light around the poles of the earth – but we can not see it here in Michigan until a solar flare occurs and the stream of particles accelerates and pushes the ring south.

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

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

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

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