Huge thunderstorm on Jupiter captured in best detail ever seen

A thunderstorm that raged in Jupiter’s atmosphere for weeks was fortuitously captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft, giving astronomers the most detailed look ever at a storm on the gas giant.

On 29 November 2021, Juno passed directly over a 3400-kilometre-wide thunderstorm that had been tracked by astronomers on Earth since it started nearly two weeks earlier. Juno’s close approach, about 5700 kilometres above the storm, meant that Shawn Brueshaber at Michigan Technological University and his colleagues could analyse data from three of Juno’s on-board instruments,…