If you were soaring through Jupiter’s turbid skies wearing a pair of x-ray goggles, you might get lucky and witness something incredible. Brilliant flashes of light, more luminous and powerful than the Sun, occurring every 26 minutes and stretching as far as the eye can see. That’s the essence of a massive solar storm recently witnessed for the first time near Jupiter’s north pole. Jupiter’s northern lights, created when the gas giant’s prodigious magnetic field interacts with charged particles from the Sun, have long fascinated planetary scientists. But after decades of observation, many puzzles remain. Chief among Jupiter’s space weather mysteries is a bright x-ray aurora, located near the planet’s north pole.
It never goes away, but since 2006, scientists have watched it brighten and fade every 45 minutes, light a lightbulb on a dimmer switch. Now, Dunn’s observations with the Chandra X-ray observatory and other telescopes have added another twist to this dazzling enigma. The Sun constantly ejects streams of particles into space in the solar wind. When giant storms erupt, the winds become much stronger and compress Jupiter's magnetosphere, shifting its boundary with the solar wind two million kilometres through space. The study found that this interaction at the boundary triggers the high energy X-rays in Jupiter's Northern Lights, which cover an area bigger than the surface of the Earth.
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http://phys.org/news/2016-03-solar-storms-trigger-jupiter-northern.html#nRlv
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