Jupiter's Lightning Could Be Almost Unbelievably Powerful

Jupiter's Lightning Could Be Almost Unbelievably Powerful By Evan Gough - March 26, 2026 05:53 PM UTC | Physics When NASA's Juno spacecraft reached Jupiter in 2016, its observations took some of the guesswork out of understanding the massive gas giant. It showed us that the planet's magnetic field, already known to be powerful, was far more powerful than we thought. It showed us that its cloud bands extended much deeper into the atmosphere than we thought. It also exposed the chaotic polar regions that each host multiple cyclones in strange yet stable geometric configurations. Nobody should feign surprise, then, that new research based on Juno's Microwave Radiometer found that lightning on Jupiter, already known to be powerful, could be up to one million times more powerful than terrestrial lightning. These findings are in new research in AGU Advances titled " Radio Pulse Power Distribution of Lightning in Jupiter's 2021–2022 Stealth Superstorms. " The lead author is Michael Wong, a planetary scientist at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. Prior to Juno reaching Jupiter and entering its polar orbit, most of what we knew about the giant planet was based on observations from a more equatorial viewpoint. The study of the planet's lightning was also based on observing the nightside, where lightning was easily visible. Almost every spacecraft that passed by the planet also saw lightning, including New Horizons. *NASA's New Horizons spotted lightning on Jupiter when it passed by the planet in 2007. Each blob in the image is actually several lightning flashes, blurred into one by the exposure time. Detecting lightning at polar latitudes was a significant finding. Image Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI* "The Juno spacecraft—now in its 10th year of science operations at Jupiter—has detected lightning signals in both optical and radio bandpasses," the authors write. "We focus here on data from the Microwave Radiometer instrument, which has two key advantages for surveying l...