{"id":28546,"date":"2025-04-17T21:41:10","date_gmt":"2025-04-17T21:41:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/28546\/"},"modified":"2025-04-17T21:41:10","modified_gmt":"2025-04-17T21:41:10","slug":"jupiter-is-getting-slammed-by-ammonia-slushees-scientists-confirm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/28546\/","title":{"rendered":"Jupiter Is Getting Slammed by Ammonia Slushees, Scientists Confirm"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2020, a group of scientists came up with an explanation for strange inconsistencies in Jupiter\u2019s upper atmosphere. They suggested that ice-encrusted mushballs rain down during intense thunderstorms on the gas giant. At the time, however, the notion of ammonia-packed slushee hailstones seemed too weird to be true, so they spent the next several years trying to prove it wrong.<\/p>\n

But Jupiter\u2019s mushballs could not be denied. New research confirmed the bizarre phenomenon not only exists\u2014it could be taking place on all gaseous planets of the solar system.<\/p>\n

In the recent finding<\/a>, reported in the journal Science Advances, planetary scientists at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) confirmed that hailstorms of mushballs, accompanied by fierce lightning, occur on Jupiter. The mushballs\u2014slushy orbs of ammonia and water encased in a hard shell of water ice\u2014deliver ammonia to deeper layers of Jupiter, unmixing its atmosphere.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

UC Berkeley graduate student Chris Moeckel and astronomy professor Imke de Pater co-authored the study, which is currently under peer review. They admit they initially thought the theory was too elaborate to be true. \u201cImke and I both were like, \u2018There\u2019s no way in the world this is true,\u2019\u201d Moeckel said in a statement<\/a>. \u201cSo many things have to come together to actually explain this, it seems so exotic. I basically spent three years trying to prove this wrong. And I couldn\u2019t prove it wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"CrossA cross-section of Jupiter\u2019s upper atmosphere (the troposphere) reveals storm depths along a north-south slice across the equator. Blue areas show higher-than-normal ammonia levels, while red indicates lower concentrations. Image: Chris Moeckel, UC Berkeley <\/p>\n

Jupiter is known for its stormy weather, featuring cyclones, anticyclones, large storms, and ammonia-rich plumes that engulf the planet. The planet\u2019s atmosphere is primarily made of hydrogen and helium gas with trace amounts of ammonia and water.<\/p>\n

Violent storms within Jupiter\u2019s tumultuous atmosphere are generating the mushballs and shallow lightning, according to the new research.\u00a0These mushballs are created by thunderstorm clouds located around 40 miles (64 kilometers) beneath Jupiter\u2019s cloud tops. The thunderstorm clouds carry water ice all the way up toward extreme altitudes that are sometimes above the visible layer of clouds. Once they\u2019re at the top, ammonia acts like an antifreeze, melting the ice and combining with it, eventually forming a slushy ammonia-water liquid that is then coated with water ice, thus creating a mushball.<\/p>\n

\"IllustrationGraphic showing how violent storms on Jupiter\u2014and likely on other gas giants\u2014can produce mushballs and shallow lightning. \u00a9 NASA\/JPL-Caltech\/SwRI\/CNRS <\/p>\n

The idea of mushballs was first presented as an explanation for a long-held Jovian mystery: why ammonia is missing from parts of Jupiter\u2019s atmosphere. According to the paper, the mushballs rise up through the atmosphere until they become too heavy and fall back down until they evaporate. In doing so, the mushballs redistribute ammonia and water from the upper atmosphere to layers deep below the clouds, creating areas of depleted ammonia that are visible in radio observations of Jupiter.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo you have, essentially, this weird system that gets triggered far below the cloud deck, goes all the way to the top of the atmosphere and then sinks deep into the planet,\u201d Moeckel said. This results in the chemical composition of the cloud tops not necessarily reflecting the composition deeper in Jupiter\u2019s atmosphere.<\/p>\n

The researchers behind the study created the first 3D visualization of Jupiter\u2019s upper atmosphere, which confirmed that mushballs do exist. In fact, the slushy hailstorms could exist on other giant planets like Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Using observations from the Juno spacecraft\u2019s Microwave Radiometer, the Very Large Array, and the Hubble Space Telescope, the researchers were able to probe the depth and impact of weather on Jupiter. The 3D visualization showed that, while the majority of the weather systems on Jupiter are shallow, taking place around 6 to 12 miles (10 to 20 kilometers) below the visible cloud deck of the planet, other weather events go much deeper into Jupiter\u2019s stratosphere. \u201cEvery time you look at Jupiter, it\u2019s mostly just surface level,\u201d Moeckel said. \u201cIt\u2019s shallow, but a few things\u2014vortices and these big storms\u2014can punch through.\u201d<\/p>\n

The study concludes that the shallow weather events on Jupiter cannot explain the depletion of ammonia in the deeper parts of Jupiter\u2019s atmosphere. Instead, the interplay of large-scale events, such as plumes and vortices, combined with storm-scale phenomenon, such as the mushball hailstorms, may be responsible for depleting Jupiter\u2019s atmosphere.<\/p>\n

Missions sent to Jupiter and other distant planets of the solar system can only see the upper atmospheres, which is \u201cactually a pretty bad representative of what is inside the planet,\u201d Moeckel said. \u201cThe turbulent cloud tops would lead you to believe that the atmosphere is well mixed,\u201d he added. \u201cIf you look at the top, you see it boiling, and you would assume that the whole pot is boiling. But these findings show that even though the top looks like it\u2019s boiling, below is a layer that really is very steady and sluggish.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 2020, a group of scientists came up with an explanation for strange inconsistencies in Jupiter\u2019s upper atmosphere.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28547,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3844],"tags":[4741,17172,874,70,413,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-28546","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-juno","9":"tag-jupiter","10":"tag-nasa","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-space","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114355482415312449","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28546\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}