{"id":218269,"date":"2025-07-19T02:17:23","date_gmt":"2025-07-19T07:17:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/unusual-plasma-waves-above-jupiters-north-pole"},"modified":"2025-07-19T02:17:23","modified_gmt":"2025-07-19T07:17:23","slug":"unusual-plasma-waves-above-jupiters-north-pole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/unusual-plasma-waves-above-jupiters-north-pole","title":{"rendered":"Unusual Plasma Waves Above Jupiter\u2019s North Pole"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/unusual-plasma-waves-above-jupiters-north-pole2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A spacecraft observes a new oscillation mode in the low-density plasma.<\/p>\n<p>The Juno space probe has spent the past nine years observing Jupiter and its moons. As the spacecraft\u2019s mission draws to a close, the precession of its orbit has caused its closest approach to the gas giant to shift toward the north pole, enabling it to uncover a surprise: an unusual pattern of plasma waves in the planet\u2019s magnetosphere. Now Robert Lysak of the University of Minnesota and his colleagues describe these waves and propose a mechanism for generating them [<a href=\"https:\/\/physics.aps.org\/articles\/v18\/s87#c1\">1<\/a>]. Their theory offers a new component to include in planetary magnetosphere models and opens a new plasma regime to further exploration.<\/p>\n<p>According to textbook plasma physics, collective waves of electrons in a plasma called Langmuir waves tend to oscillate parallel to magnetic-field lines at a so-called plasma frequency that\u2019s much greater than the ions\u2019 angular frequency around these field lines, their gyrofrequency. Meanwhile, ions tend to oscillate perpendicular to magnetic-field lines as Alfv\u00e9n waves, with an upper frequency limit corresponding to the ion gyrofrequency. The waves detected by Juno, however, departed from that paradigm: The Alfven waves\u2019 frequency extended only to the plasma frequency, which was less than the ion gyrofrequency. And the waves\u2019 frequency never exceeded the plasma frequency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A spacecraft observes a new oscillation mode in the low-density plasma. The Juno space probe has spent the past nine years observing Jupiter and its moons. As the spacecraft\u2019s mission draws to a close, the precession of its orbit has caused its closest approach to the gas giant to shift toward the north pole, enabling [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[219,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218269\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}