Discontinuity in Jupiter's main auroral oval

Abstract

On the basis of a series of FUV Hubble Space Telescope images obtained between 1997 and 2007 it is shown that there is a segment of the main auroral oval where the emission drops significantly from a few hundreds to a few tens of kiloRayleigh, forming a discontinuity in the oval. It is shown that the discontinuity is present in both hemispheres and confined in magnetic local time. Its equatorial source is located in the prenoon and early noon sector. The main auroral oval is associated with the ionosphere‐magnetosphere coupling current system which is related to the breakdown of corotation in the middle magnetosphere. Necessary for the electron precipitation in the ionosphere and the formation of the main auroral oval is the presence of upward field‐aligned currents, carried by downward moving electrons. Field‐aligned currents inferred by Pioneer, Voyager and Galileo in situ observations in the near equatorial plane showed evidence of reduced or/and downward field‐aligned currents in the prenoon and early afternoon sector, the location of the equatorial source of the discontinuity. Additionally, we estimate the precipitation energy flux in the ionosphere, for a typical reduced upward field‐aligned current value at that region, which is found to be within the range of the observed brightness of the discontinuity. Field aligned current distributions in the ionosphere based on magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the interaction between the solar wind and the magnetosphere have predicted a region of downward currents implying a discontinuity at the main auroral oval emission, in very good agreement with the HST observations presented in this work.