According to the latest report from a research team at the University of California, Berkeley, some storms on Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, are releasing incredibly powerful lightning, which may be 100 times more powerful than lightning on Earth, and may even be stronger. Based on data obtained by NASA's Juno probe, researchers pointed out that these new discoveries provide important clues for understanding Jupiter's extreme weather system and the convection mechanism in the planet's atmosphere.
The study is based on observational data collected by Juno during its orbit around Jupiter since 2016. The microwave radiometer carried by the detector can capture radio signals released by lightning. Its working principle is similar to the interference caused by lightning on radio communications on Earth, except that it detects microwave signals at the high-frequency end of the radio spectrum.
Researchers said that studying lightning phenomena beyond the Earth will not only help understand the weather processes on other planets, but can also in turn help humans understand the many unknown thunderstorm activities in the Earth's atmosphere. Michael Huang, the first author of the paper and a planetary scientist at the Space Science Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, pointed out that in the past decade, the scientific community has successively identified a variety of "transient luminous events" above severe thunderstorms on Earth, including millisecond-scale electrical phenomena such as red sprites, jets, haloes and ELVEs. This shows that people still know very little about lightning itself.
On Jupiter, lightning is regarded as an important window for observing atmospheric convection. Unlike Earth, Jupiter's atmosphere is dominated by hydrogen, and moist air is heavier in this environment and therefore more difficult to lift. In contrast, Earth's atmosphere is mostly composed of nitrogen, while water vapor is lighter than the surrounding air and rises more easily to form convection currents. The research team pointed out that because of this, Jupiter's storms need to accumulate stronger energy during the development process. Once they reach high altitudes, they may be released in a more violent way, forming strong winds and extremely violent cloud lightning.
In fact, lightning has been detected by almost every spacecraft that has flown by Jupiter. Due to the darkness of Jupiter's night side, early missions usually could only see the brightest flashes, which once led the scientific community to believe that Jupiter's lightning was much stronger than that of Earth. However, this understanding has been partially revised as the highly sensitive star-tracking camera on Juno discovered a large number of weak lightnings similar to those of the Earth. The researchers also pointed out that relying solely on visible light observations at night may lead to misjudgment, because thick clouds will block part of the light, making lightning appear weaker than it actually is.
In contrast, microwave radiometers are able to penetrate clouds and are therefore considered more suitable for assessing the true intensity of lightning. However, Jupiter's atmosphere has a wide bandwidth and multiple storms often occur at the same time, making it difficult for researchers to accurately map a radio pulse to a specific storm. If the source of lightning cannot be located, it is difficult to accurately calculate the energy of a single lightning strike.
The transition will occur between 2021 and 2022. At that time, storm activity in Jupiter's north equatorial belt weakened for a time, and the research team was able to combine observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Juno camera, and amateur astronomers to locate several isolated storm systems. Michael Huang calls these storms "invisible superstorms." These storms can last for months and reshape surrounding cloud structures much like larger superstorms, although their cloud tops are not as high.
During this observation window, Juno flew over isolated storms 12 times, four of which were close enough to detect microwave signals produced by lightning. The detector recorded an average of three lightning strikes per second, and even captured 206 separate pulses during one of its flybys. From a total of 613 pulse samples, the researchers estimated that Jupiter's lightning intensity ranged from equal to that of Earth to more than 100 times greater than that of Earth. The research team also emphasized that due to the inconsistent radio wavelengths used in different studies, there is still a certain degree of uncertainty in such cross-planetary comparisons; other studies even speculated that Jupiter's lightning may be millions of times stronger than Earth's.
Regarding the conversion of the total energy of lightning, Ivana Kormashova, a space physicist at Charles University in Prague and the Czech Academy of Sciences, who participated in the research, pointed out that this process is very complicated because lightning releases energy in various forms such as radio, light, heat, sound, and chemical reactions. By Earth standards, a single lightning bolt typically releases about 1 billion joules of energy, enough to power 200 average homes for one hour. Based on this, Michael Huang estimates that a single lightning strike on Jupiter may release 500 times to up to 10,000 times the energy of lightning on Earth.
Researchers believe that the formation mechanism of lightning on Jupiter may be generally similar to that on Earth, that is, rising water vapor condenses into water droplets and ice crystals, accumulating charges during the collision process, eventually forming a huge voltage difference and triggering a discharge. However, in addition to water, the ice particles on Jupiter also contain ammonia. The scientific community has proposed that these ingredients may combine into "mushroom balls" similar to "smoothie hail" and fall in the atmosphere. This may be closely related to the formation process of lightning.
Although new research brings clearer observational evidence, why Jupiter's lightning is so powerful remains a mystery. Researchers pointed out that stronger lightning means higher voltage, but it has not yet been determined whether the difference between the hydrogen-dominated atmospheric environment and the nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere of the Earth plays a key role, or whether it is because of the thunderstorm system with a storm height of more than 100 kilometers on Jupiter, which is about 10 kilometers higher than the Earth, or because Jupiter's moist convection needs to accumulate more heat before it explodes. The relevant team stated that this field is still in the active research stage.
This research paper titled "Lightning Radio Pulse Power Distribution of Jupiter's "Stealth Super Storm" in 2021-2022" was published in the journal "AGU Advances" on March 20, 2026. The research was funded by NASA.