Jupiter's auroras are powerful —and very different from Earth's

"We assumed the most intense auroras were created by these strong potentials that we expected to find. We've found them but they don't seem to be as important as we thought. Something else is stepping in," study author Barry Mauk from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory told Axios.

Best guess: As charged electrons in plasma gases above the planet's atmosphere interact with plasma waves, they gain or lose energy. Over time, Mauk says, in a random fashion, electrons at different energies may hit the atmosphere and cause auroras. These turbulent interactions happen on Earth, too, and create strong fluxes of energy down toward the atmosphere but a weak flux coming up. Mauk: "At Jupiter, for reasons we don't understand, even though the downward fluxes are strong enough to create most powerful aurora in the solar system, the upward fluxes are even stronger."

What's next: The orbit of Juno, the NASA spacecraft being used to study Jupiter, will soon pass closer to the aurora over the planet's northern pole. Mauk hopes that will tell them more about the processes at play.