A New Plasma Wave for Jupiter

A New Plasma Wave for Jupiter

Jupiter‘s North Pole has a powerful magnetic field combined with plasma that has unusually low electron densities. This combination, researchers found, gives rise to a new type of plasma wave. Ions in a magnetic field typically move parallel to magnetic field lines in Langmuir waves and perpendicularly to the field lines in Alfvén waves — with each wave carrying a distinctive frequency signature. But in Jupiter’s strong magnetosphere, low-densit…