Collaborative work by amateur and professional astronomers has helped to resolve a long-standing misunderstanding about the composition of Jupiter’s clouds.
Collaborative work by amateur and professional astronomers has helped to resolve a long-standing misunderstanding about the composition of Jupiter’s clouds. Instead of being formed of ammonia ice – the conventional view – it now appears they are likely to be composed of ammonium hydrosulphide mixed with smog. The findings have been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Planets.
The new discovery was triggered by amateur astronomer, Dr Steven Hill, based in Colorado. Recently, he demonstrated that the abundance of ammonia and cloud-top pressure in Jupiter’s atmosphere could be mapped using commercially-available telescopes and a few specially coloured filters. Remarkably, these initial results not only showed that the abundance of ammonia in Jupiter’s atmosphere could be mapped by amateur astronomers, they also showed that the clouds reside too deeply within Jupiter’s warm atmosphere to be consistent with the clouds being ammonia ice.
In this new study, Professor Patrick Irwin from the University of Oxford’s Department of Physics applied Dr Steven Hill’s analytical method to observations of Jupiter made with the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. MUSE uses the power of spectroscopy, where Jupiter’s gases create telltale fingerprints in visible light at different wavelengths, to map the ammonia and cloud heights in the gas giant’s atmosphere.
Read more at University of Oxford
Photo Credit: GustavoAckles via Pixabay
