Ammonia ‘mushballs’ could spark strange lightning on Jupiter
These storms are thought to contain a kind of water-ammonia hail ('mushballs') specific to Jupiter's atmosphere, which drags the ammonia down into the deep atmosphere and may explain the presence of shallow lightning flashes. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill/)The forecast for Jupiter’s weather is cloudy with a chance of “mushballs.” The swirl-shrouded planet is host to violent storms that have raged across its surface for hundreds of years, clocking wind speeds stronger than a Category 5 hurricane on Earth. Now we can add another phenomenon to the planet’s laundry list of weird meteorological events—ammonia-laden hail dubbed “mushballs” that are formed during its violent thunderstorms.Ever since Voyager 1 first took pictures of Jupiter in 1979, we’ve seen massive jolts of energy deep beneath the planet’s cloud tops. But according to Heidi Becker, a physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, spotting lightning in the upper reaches of the gas giant’s atmosphere has proven challenging—it...