Eleven transient bright flashes were detected in Jupiter's atmosphere using the ultraviolet spectrograph instrument on the Juno spacecraft. These bright flashes are only observed in a single spin of the spacecraft and their brightness decays exponentially with time, with a duration of ∼1.4 ms. The spectra are dominated by H₂ Lyman band emission and based on the level of atmospheric absorption, we estimate a source altitude of 260 km above the 1‐bar level. Based on these characteristics, we suggest that these are observations of transient luminous events (TLEs) in Jupiter's upper atmosphere. In particular, we suggest that these are elves, sprites or sprite halos, three types of TLEs that occur in the Earth's upper atmosphere in response to tropospheric lightning strikes. This is supported by visible light imaging, which shows cloud features typical of lightning source regions at the locations of several of the bright flashes. TLEs have previously only been observed on Earth, although theoretical and experimental work has predicted that they should also be present on Jupiter.

中文翻译：

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在木星上层大气中观察到的可能的瞬时发光事件

使用朱诺号航天器上的紫外线光谱仪，在木星的大气层中检测到11次短暂的明亮闪光。这些明亮的闪光仅在航天器的一次旋转中观察到，并且它们的亮度随时间呈指数衰减，持续时间约为1.4毫秒。光谱以H ₂为主莱曼波段发射和基于大气吸收的水平，我们估计源高度在1 bar之上260 km。基于这些特征，我们建议这些是木星高层大气中瞬时发光事件（TLE）的观测结果。特别是，我们建议它们是精灵，小精灵或小精灵光环，这是三种类型的TLE，它们是对流层雷击在地球的高层大气中发生的。这由可见光成像提供支持，可见光成像显示了几次明亮闪光所在位置的典型雷电源区域云特征。TLE以前仅在地球上被观测到，尽管理论和实验工作预测它们也应该存在于木星上。