Author: Christopher Crockett / Source: Science News
If Earth’s magnetic field resembles that of a bar magnet, Jupiter’s field looks like someone took a bar magnet, bent it in half and splayed it at both ends.
The field emerges in a broad swath across Jupiter’s northern hemisphere and re-enters the planet both around the south pole and in a concentrated spot just south of the equator, researchers report in the Sept. 6 Nature.
“We were baffled” at the finding, says study coauthor Kimberly Moore, a graduate student at Harvard University.
The new look at Jupiter’s magnetic field comes courtesy of NASA’s Juno spacecraft, which has been orbiting the planet since July 2016 (SN: 6/25/16,…
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