Chandra Release - March 22, 2016

Visual Description: Jupiter

There are two side-by-side images X-ray and optical composite images of Jupiter that showcase the planet's distinct features. Jupiter has a round shape and is textured with stripes of white, reddish-brown and yellow across its surface with a pop of purple on the top and bottom poles. One bright reddish-brown spot can be seen on Jupiter's surface, on the lower right side. Sometimes, giant storms, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), erupt from our Sun and its winds become much stronger. These events compress Jupiter's magnetosphere, the region of space controlled by Jupiter's magnetic field, shifting its boundary with the solar wind inward by more than a million miles. These composite images show Jupiter and its aurora during and after a CME's arrival at Jupiter in October 2011. In these images, X-ray data from Chandra (colored in purple) have been overlaid on an optical image from the Hubble Space Telescope. The left-hand panel reveals the X-ray activity when the CME reached Jupiter (October 2, 2011), with a larger and brighter purple and white cap on the top of the planet, and a small purple goatee on the bottom.  The right-hand side is the view two days later after the CME subsided (October 4, 2011) and shows a reduced dimmed purple cap and slightly brighter ring.