Speaker
Description
Jupiter’s famous banding reflects powerful jet streams that probe deep atmospheric and interior processes. Since arriving in 2016, NASA’s Juno spacecraft, in a series of close, polar perijove passes, has returned high-precision gravity measurements from its Gravity Science experiment (tracking Doppler shifts of the spacecraft), alongside complementary data from the Microwave Radiometer and Magnetometer, enabling unprecedented constraints on mass anomalies, deep atmospheric structure, and magnetic-field–flow interactions. These gravity data indicate jets extend thousands of kilometers but leave the detailed vertical decay uncertain because it depends on the assumed interior density distribution, among other uncertainties, typically taken as adiabatic. Here we examine how subadiabatic (stable) layers beneath the weather layer modify the density structure and thus Jupiter’s gravity signal; using temperature–pressure profiles with plausible stable stratification and a modern equation of state, we show such layers can substantially alter background density and interact with wind-induced mass anomalies to widen the range of vertical wind profiles consistent with measured gravitational harmonics, implying that assuming a purely adiabatic interior can falsely tighten constraints on jet depth and that independent constraints on Jupiter’s internal stability are needed to uniquely determine how deep the jets penetrate. We also compare gravity-implied vertical structures with profiles from numerical simulations and Earth analogs to assess typicality, and conclude by emphasizing the strong degeneracy between thermodynamic stratification and wind decay, highlighting the need for complementary future observations and targeted modeling to break this degeneracy and robustly infer Jupiter’s deep jet structure.
| Talk category | NOVA Network 2 |
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