Everything's bigger on Jupiter, including its lightning bolts
A new study examining microwave radiation data from NASA's Juno mission provides some clues as to why the lightning bolts on Jupiter may be up to 10,000 times more powerful.
In this view of a vortex near Jupiter’s north pole, NASA’s Juno mission observed the glow from a bolt of lightning on Dec. 30, 2020. (NASA)
NASA's Juno spacecraft has been orbiting Jupiter for 10 years. During that time, it has studied the huge storms on the planet, such as the Great Red Spot, which is larger than Earth. New data shows that lightning strikes inside Jupiter's atmosphere may be more than 500 times as powerful than on Earth.
Lead author Michael Wong, a planetary scientist at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory, published the study March 20 in the journal AGU Advances.
“Convection operates a little bit differently on Earth and Jupiter because Jupiter has a hydrogen-dominated atmosphere, so moist air is heavier and harder to bring upward," Wong said.
Almost every spacecraft passing by Jupiter has detected lightning in its atmosphere, and Juno even captured the glow from a bolt of lightning in 2020 in a storm near its north pole.
Wong used data from one of Juno's core instruments, a microwave radiometer, to precisely measure the power of the lightning. In 2021 and 2022, a lull in storms in the Northern Equatorial Belt produced a chance to study four single, large "stealth superstorms" without the background noise of lightning from the entire belt.
Juno’s orbit approached one of the stealth superstorm eruptions on PJ 44 in August 2022, observing a cluster of lightning signals with the MWR. The Juno spacecraft track is shown in gold, with MWR boresight positions corresponding to lightning pulse detections shown in cyan, over an HST map obtained about 18 hours prior to the Juno pass. (AGU Advances, Volume: 7, Issue: 2, First published: 20 March 2026, DOI: (10.1029/2025AV002083))
What he found was a lot of very strong lightning activity in the superstorm. On Aug. 16, 2022, Juno detected 613 pulses of microwave radiation coming from the lightning bolts. On Earth, a single lightning bolt releases about 1 gigaJoule of energy, but Wong estimates that a Jupiter bolt contains between 500 and 10,000 times more power.
Why is Jupiter's lightning so much more powerful? Wong says the key difference could be that Jupiter's atmosphere is mostly hydrogen, whereas Earth's is mostly nitrogen. But then again, Jupiter's thunderstorms are more than 60 miles tall, while those on Earth rarely exceed 6 miles. More research on that topic is needed to find the cause, Wong added.
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