A planetary-scale heat wave in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, sent by the aurora

A panning-view of Jupiter’s upper atmospheric temperatures, 1000 kilometers above the cloud tops. Jupiter is shown on top of a visible image for context. In this snapshot, the auroral region appears to have shed a massive, planetary-scale wave of heating towards the equator. The feature is over 130,000 kilometers long, or 10-Earth diameters, and is hundreds of degrees warmer than the background. Read about the study here! Visible Jupiter image is from Hubble / NASA / ESA / A. Simon (NASA GSFC) / J. Schmidt.