Jupiter’s atmospheric winds penetrate in cylindrical layers, NASA's Juno reveals

NASA's Juno mission has revealed that Jupiter's atmospheric winds penetrate the planet in a cylindrical manner, parallel to its spin axis. The finding offers deeper insights into the long-debated internal structure of the largest planet in our solar system.

To determine the location and cylindrical nature of the winds, Yohai Kaspi of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, the study's lead author and a Juno co-investigator, and his colleagues applied a mathematical technique that models gravitational variations and surface elevations of Earth-like rocky planets.

According to the researchers, this technique can be used to accurately map winds at depth at the gas giant. Using the high-precision Juno data, the authors generated a four-fold increase in the resolution over previous models created with data from NASA's Voyager and Galileo missions.

"We applied a constraining technique developed for sparse data sets on terrestrial planets to process the Juno data. This is the first time such a technique has been applied to an outer planet," said Ryan Park, a Juno scientist and lead of the mission's gravity science investigation from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

The measurements of the gravity field not only matched a two-decade-old model that determined Jupiter's powerful east-west zonal flows extend from the cloud-level white and red zones and belts inward, but also revealed that rather than extending in every direction like a radiating sphere, the zonal flows go inward, cylindrically, and are oriented along the direction of Jupiter's rotation axis.

NASA's Juno, currently on an extended mission to study Jupiter and its moons, has been orbiting the gas giant since 2016. The solar-powered spacecraft has completed a series of flybys of its icy moons Ganymede and Europa and is in the midst of several close flybys of the volcanic moon Io. The upcoming December 30 flyby of Io will be the closest to date, when the spacecraft will be coming within about 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) of its volcano-festooned surface.