JUPITER’S MOON GANYMEDE GENERATES INCREDIBLE MAGNETIC WAVES

NASA’s Galileo spacecraft surprised scientists when it revealed that Jupiter’s moon Ganymede generated its own magnetic field. But new research shows Ganymede also creates incredibly powerful waves that rocket particles to enormous energies.

Scientists revealed these huge electromagnetic waves while studying old data from Galileo, which orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003. The observations show another wild way that a moon can interact with the magnetic field of its planet. It’s a cool piece of science.

“This is a very interesting and fascinating finding,” Yuri Shprits, scientist at the GFZ Helmholtz Centre Potsdam in Germany, told Gizmodo. “Just by having an object with a magnetosphere in the radiation environment, you can produce such strong waves.”