Bibcode
López-Puertas, Manuel; Montañés-Rodríguez, Pilar; Pallé, E.; Höpfner, M.; Sánchez-López, A.; García-Comas, M.; Funke, B.
Referencia bibliográfica
The Astronomical Journal, Volume 156, Issue 4, article id. 169, 13 pp. (2018).
Fecha de publicación:
10
2018
Número de citas
6
Número de citas referidas
6
Descripción
Jupiter’s atmosphere has been sounded in transmission from the UV
to the IR, as if it were a transiting exoplanet, by observing Ganymede
while passing through Jupiter’s shadow. The spectra show strong
extinction due to the presence of aerosols and haze in Jupiter’s
atmosphere and strong absorption features of methane. Here, we report a
new detailed analysis of these observations, with special emphasis on
the retrievals of the vertical distribution of the aerosols and their
sizes, and the properties and distribution of the stratospheric water
ice. Our analysis suggests the presence of aerosols near the equator in
the altitude range of 100 hPa up to at least 0.01 hPa, with a layer of
small particles (mean radius of 0.1 μm) in the upper part (above 0.1
hPa), an intermediate layer of aerosols with a radius of 0.3 μm,
extending between ∼10 and 0.01 hPa, and a layer with larger sizes of
∼0.6 μm at approximately 100–1 hPa. The corresponding loads
for each layer are ∼2 × 10‑7 g
cm‑2, ∼3.4 × 10‑7 g
cm‑2, and ∼1.5 × 10‑6 g
cm‑2, respectively, with a total load of ∼2.0
× 10‑6 g cm‑2. The lower and
middle layers agree well with previous measurements; but the finer
particles of 0.1 μm above 0.01 hPa have not been reported before. The
spectra also show two broad features near 1.5 and 2.0 μm, which we
attribute to a layer of very small (∼10 nm) H2O
crystalline ice in Jupiter’s lower stratosphere (∼0.5 hPa).
While these spectral signatures seem to be unequivocally attributable to
crystalline water ice, they require a large amount of water ice to
explain the strong absorption features.
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