Bit by bit, Jupiter is revealing its deepest, darkest secrets.

The latest findings are in from the Juno spacecraft. And they unveil the roots of the planet’s storms, what lies beneath the opaque atmosphere and a striking geometric layout of cyclones parked around the gas giant’s north and south poles.

“We’re at the beginning of dissecting Jupiter,” says Juno mission leader Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. And the picture that’s emerging — still just a sketch — topples many preconceived notions. The results appear in four papers in the March 8 Nature.
Juno has been orbiting Jupiter since July 4, 2016, on a mission to map the planet’s interior (SN: 6/25/16, p. 16). The probe loops around once every 53 days, traveling on an elongated orbit that takes the spacecraft from pole to pole and as close as about 4,000 kilometers above the cloud tops.

As it plows through Jupiter’s gravity field, Juno speeds up and slows down in response to shifting masses inside the planet. By measuring these minute accelerations and decelerations, scientists can calculate subtle variations in Jupiter’s gravity and deduce how its mass is distributed. That lets researchers build up a three-dimensional map of the planet’s internal structure. At the same time, Juno snaps pictures in visible and infrared light. While other probes have extensively photographed much of the planet, Juno is the first to get an intimate look at the north and south poles.

“The whole thing is really intriguing, especially when you compare [Jupiter] to other giant planets,” says Imke de Pater, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. “They are all unique, it looks like.”
Check out these four surprising new things we’ve learned that make Jupiter one of a kind:

1. Rings of cyclones
   Parked at each pole is a cyclone several thousand kilometers wide. That part isn’t surprising. But each of those cyclones is encircled by a polygonal arrangement of similarly sized storms — eight in the north and five in the south. The patterns have persisted throughout Juno’s visit.

“We don’t really understand why that would happen, and why they would collect up there in such a geometric fashion,” Bolton says. “That’s pretty amazing that nature is capable of something like that.”

2. More than skin deep
   Researchers have long debated whether the photogenic bands of clouds that wrap around Jupiter have deep roots or just skim the top of the atmosphere. Juno’s new look shows that the bands penetrate roughly 3,000 kilometers below the cloud tops. That’s 30 times as thick as the bulk of Earth’s atmosphere. While just a tiny fraction of Jupiter’s diameter, that’s deeper than previously thought, Bolton says.
3. Weighty weather
   Within those 3,000 kilometers lies what passes for an atmosphere on Jupiter. It’s the stage on which Jupiter’s turbulent weather plays out. The atmosphere alone is about three times as massive as our planet, or 1 percent of Jupiter’s entire mass, researchers estimate.
4. Stuck together
   Below the atmosphere, Jupiter is fluid. But unlike most fluids, the planet rotates as if it’s a solid mass. Like kids playing crack-the-whip, atoms of hydrogen and helium figuratively link arms and spin around the planet in unison, scientists report. Earlier results from Juno also indicate there’s no solid core lurking beneath this fluid (SN: 6/24/17, p. 14), so anyone dropped into the planet can expect a terribly long fall.

Many of these results are preliminary, and it’s unclear what it all means for how Jupiter operates. But what’s been learned so far, Bolton says, “is quite different than anybody anticipated.”

LOS ANGELES — In the search for new superconductors, scientists are leaving no stone — and no meteorite — unturned. A team of physicists has now found the unusual materials, famous for their ability to conduct electricity without resistance, within two space rocks.

The discovery implies that small amounts of superconducting materials might be relatively common in meteorites, James Wampler of the University of California, San Diego, said March 6 at a meeting of the American Physical Society. While the superconducting materials found weren’t new to science, additional interplanetary interlopers might harbor new, more technologically appealing varieties of superconductors, the researchers suggest.
Superconductors could potentially beget new, energy-saving technologies, but they have one fatal flaw: They require very cold temperatures to function, making them impractical for most uses. So scientists are on the hunt for new types of superconductors that work at room temperature (SN: 12/26/15, p. 25). If found, such a substance could lead to dramatic improvements in power transmission, computing and high-speed magnetically levitated trains, among other things.

Space rocks are a good avenue to explore in the search for new, exotic materials, says Wampler. “Meteorites are formed under these really unique, really extreme conditions,” such as high temperatures and pressures.

What makes the meteorite superconductors special, the researchers say, is that they occurred naturally, instead of being fabricated in a lab, as most known superconductors are. In fact, says physicist Ivan Schuller, also of University of California, San Diego, these are the highest temperature naturally occurring superconductors known — although they still have to be superchilled to about 5 kelvins (–268.15° C) to work. They are also the first known to have formed extraterrestrially.

“At this point, it’s a novelty,” says chemist Robert Cava of Princeton University. Although Cava is skeptical that scrutinizing meteorites will lead to new, useful superconductors, he says, it’s “kinda cool” that superconductors show up in meteorites.
Wampler, Schuller and colleagues bombarded bits of powdered meteorite with microwaves and looked for changes in how those waves were absorbed as the temperature changed. The sensitive technique can pick out minute traces of superconducting material within a sample.

Analysis of powdered scrapings from more than a dozen meteorites showed that two meteorites contained superconducting material. However, the superconductors found within the meteorites were run-of-the-mill varieties, made from alloys of metals including indium, tin and lead, which are already known to superconduct.

“The idea is, try to look for something that is very unusual,” such as a room temperature superconductor, says Schuller, who led the research. So far, that hope hasn’t been realized — but that hasn’t deterred the search for something more exotic. For a previous study, Wampler, Schuller and colleagues scanned 65 tiny micrometeorites, but found no superconductors at all.

Since parts of space are colder than 5 kelvins, some meteorites may even contain materials that were once superconducting in their chilly natural habitat. That’s an interesting idea, Wampler says, although it’s too early to say whether that possibility might have any astronomical implications for how the objects behave out in space.

Zeptonewton
ZEP-toe-new-ton n.
A unit of force equal to one billionth of a trillionth of a newton.

An itty-bitty object can be used to suss out teeny-weeny forces.

Scientists used an atom of the element ytterbium to sense an electromagnetic force smaller than 100 zeptonewtons, researchers report online March 23 in Science Advances. That’s less than 0.0000000000000000001 newtons — with, count ‘em, 18 zeroes after the decimal. At about the same strength as the gravitational pull between a person in Dallas and another in Washington, D.C., that’s downright feeble.
After removing one of the atom’s electrons, researchers trapped the atom using electric fields and cooled it to less than a thousandth of a degree above absolute zero (–273.15° Celsius) by hitting it with laser light. That light, counterintuitively, can cause an atom to chill out. The laser also makes the atom glow, and scientists focused that light into an image with a miniature Fresnel lens, a segmented lens like those used to focus lighthouse beams.

Monitoring the motion of the atom’s image allowed the researchers to study how the atom responded to electric fields, and to measure the minuscule force caused by particles of light scattering off the atom, a measly 95 zeptonewtons.