Jupiter’s Lightning Is Hundreds of Times More Powerful Than Earth’s

A team of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley has found that lightning bolts inside Jupiter’s storms can reach intensities hundreds, and in some cases tens of thousands, of times greater than anything produced in Earth’s atmosphere.

Jupiter’s atmosphere generates storms far more intense than anything on Earth

This gas giant, roughly 1,300 times larger in volume than Earth, is perpetually wrapped in churning cloud bands. Storms stretching tens of thousands of kilometers spin continuously across its surface; some have persisted for centuries. The Great Red Spot alone has been observed for more than 350 years.

Jupiter’s atmosphere is composed primarily of hydrogen, unlike Earth’s nitrogen-dominated air, and that difference reshapes how storms form. In a hydrogen atmosphere, moist air is actually denser than the surrounding gas, which means storm systems require far greater energy to form. When they do, the release is proportionally more violent.

Storm clouds on Jupiter can tower more than 100 kilometers into the atmosphere. Earth’s thunderclouds typically reach about 10 kilometers. Heat accumulates deep in Jupiter’s atmospheric layers, building pressure until it detonates in bursts of lightning that, from a distance, look like explosions inside the planet itself.

Juno’s instruments penetrated the cloud cover to measure the lightning directly

Earlier missions to Jupiter, including Voyager and Galileo, detected electrical activity in the atmosphere, but Jupiter’s thick cloud layers made precise measurement impossible. Juno changed that. The spacecraft carries a microwave radiometer capable of piercing through the cloud cover and detecting the microwave signals that lightning generates as a byproduct. It was the first instrument able to estimate the energy output of Jovian lightning with any precision.

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Using this data, the Berkeley team found that some lightning strikes inside Jupiter’s storms reach intensities roughly 100 times greater than a typical Earth bolt, and potentially much higher. For context: an average terrestrial lightning strike releases around one billion joules of energy, enough to power about 200 households for an hour. The most powerful storms on Jupiter appear to dwarf that figure by orders of magnitude.

‘Invisible super-storms’ concealed extreme electrical activity

The researchers also identified what they called invisible super-storms: storm systems that appeared unremarkable from the outside but concealed enormous electrical energy within.

Between 2021 and 2022, storm activity in Jupiter’s North Equatorial Belt temporarily subsided, giving scientists an unusual opportunity to study isolated weather systems with less interference. By combining data from Juno with observations from the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based imaging, the team identified storms that gave no outward sign of their intensity.

During a single flyby, Juno detected 206 separate microwave pulses. After analyzing a total of 613 lightning signals, the researchers found that the upper end of that range, strikes tens of thousands of times more energetic than their Earth equivalents, came from storms that satellite imagery had flagged as visually unremarkable.

Water, ice, and ammonia drive the charging process

On Earth, lightning forms when ice crystals and water droplets collide in updrafts, separating electrical charge across storm clouds until the voltage difference triggers a discharge. At high altitudes on Jupiter, a mixture of water vapor, ice crystals, and ammonia may form a slushy composite material. As these particles collide in violent convection currents, they build up charge, eventually releasing it in the massive electrical discharges Juno has been measuring.