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Evidence for auroral influence on Jupiter's nitrogen and oxygen chemistry revealed by ALMA
- Source :
- Nature Astronomy 7 (2023) 1048-1055
- Publication Year :
- 2024
-
Abstract
- The localized delivery of new long-lived species to Jupiter's stratosphere by comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994 opened a window to constrain Jovian chemistry and dynamics by monitoring the evolution of their vertical and horizontal distributions. However, the spatial distributions of CO and HCN, two of these long-lived species, had never been jointly observed at high latitudinal resolution. Atacama large millimeter/submillimeter array observations of HCN and CO in March 2017 show that CO was meridionally uniform and restricted to pressures lower than 3 $\pm$ 1 mbar. HCN shared a similar vertical distribution in the low- to mid-latitudes, but was depleted at pressures between 2$^{+2}_ {-1}$ and 0.04$^{+0.07}_{-0.03}$ mbar in the aurora and surrounding regions, resulting in a drop by two orders of magnitude in column density. We propose that heterogeneous chemistry bonds HCN on large aurora-produced aerosols at these pressures in the Jovian auroral regions causing the observed depletion.<br />Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures
- Subjects :
- Astrophysics - Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Subjects
Details
- Database :
- arXiv
- Journal :
- Nature Astronomy 7 (2023) 1048-1055
- Publication Type :
- Report
- Accession number :
- edsarx.2407.07385
- Document Type :
- Working Paper
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-023-02016-7