William Dunn

Jupiter produces stunning dynamic UV and X-ray auroral displays from both its poles. Previous work comparing these two wavebands was based on a single simultaneous Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO) observation and Hubble Space Telescope (HST) orbit from 24 February 2003. Despite the limited dataset, that revolutionary work revealed that: 1. Jupiter’s hard X-ray emission (photon energy > 2 keV), which is produced by precipitating electrons, coincided with the UV main auroral emission (Branduardi-Raymont et al. 2008) 2. that Jupiter’s soft X-ray emission (photon energy 2 keV), which is produced by precipitating ions, coincides with UV aurora flares that occur polewards of the main emission (Elsner et al. 2005).

To further explore the interconnections between the two high energy wavebands, we leverage the 22 simultaneous HST and CXO Jupiter aurora observations taken between 2016 and 2019. Here, we present overlaid X-ray and UV auroral videos from both of Jupiter’s poles, revealing the shared auroral morphologies. By working with school students, through the ORBYTS research-with-schools programme, we further investigate how different time cadences showcase shared auroral structures. For two decades the Jovian X-ray community has used the term ‘X-ray hot spot’ to define the soft X-ray auroral emissions spot (Gladstone et al. 2002; Dunn et al. 2017; Weigt et al. 2020). Here, we show that this is not a single coherent structure but may actually be connected to several seemingly distinct UV auroral morphologies. Nichols et al. (2019) and Grodent et al. (2018) both independently identify 6 types of UV auroral morphology for Jupiter. We explore further global connections by contrasting the X-ray morphology with each of these. We close by attempting to combine the knowledge of each auroral waveband to interpret possible driving processes from the shared auroral morphologies.