173 research outputs found
The Auroral Planetary Imaging and Spectroscopy (APIS) service
Get PDFThe Auroral Planetary Imaging and Spectroscopy (APIS) service, accessible
online, provides an open and interactive access to processed auroral
observations of the outer planets and their satellites. Such observations are
of interest for a wide community at the interface between planetology and
magnetospheric and heliospheric physics. APIS consists of (i) a high level
database, built from planetary auroral observations acquired by the Hubble
Space Telescope (HST) since 1997 with its mostly used Far-UltraViolet
spectro-imagers, (ii) a dedicated search interface aimed at browsing
efficiently this database through relevant conditional search criteria and
(iii) the ability to interactively work with the data online through plotting
tools developed by the Virtual Observatory (VO) community, such as Aladin and
Specview. This service is VO compliant and can therefore also been queried by
external search tools of the VO community. The diversity of available data and
the capability to sort them out by relevant physical criteria shall in
particular facilitate statistical studies, on long-term scales and/or
multi-instrumental multi-spectral combined analysis
An interplanetary shock traced by planetary auroral storms from the Sun to Saturn
Full text linkA relationship between solar activity and aurorae on Earth was postulated(1,2) long before space probes directly detected plasma propagating outwards from the Sun(3). Violent solar eruption events trigger interplanetary shocks(4) that compress Earth's magnetosphere, leading to increased energetic particle precipitation into the ionosphere and subsequent auroral storms(5,6). Monitoring shocks is now part of the 'Space Weather' forecast programme aimed at predicting solar-activity-related environmental hazards. The outer planets also experience aurorae, and here we report the discovery of a strong transient polar emission on Saturn, tentatively attributed to the passage of an interplanetary shock - and ultimately to a series of solar coronal mass ejection (CME) events. We could trace the shock-triggered events from Earth, where auroral storms were recorded, to Jupiter, where the auroral activity was strongly enhanced, and to Saturn, where it activated the unusual polar source. This establishes that shocks retain their properties and their ability to trigger planetary auroral activity thoughout the Solar System. Our results also reveal differences in the planetary auroral responses on the passing shock, especially in their latitudinal and local time dependences.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/62930/1/nature02986.pd
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