Exotic’ lightning crackles across Jupiter’s cloud tops small, frequent lightning storms zip across Jupiter’s cloud tops. NASA’s Juno spacecraft spotted the flashes for the first time, scientists report August 5 in Nature. “It’s a very exotic thing that doesn’t exist on Earth,” says physicist Heidi Becker of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Previous spacecraft have revealed high-energy “super bolts” on Jupiter. That lightning originates 50 to 65 kilometers below Jupiter’s cloud tops, where liquid water droplets form. Scientists think super bolts form like lightning on Earth.

Colliding ice crystals and water droplets charge each other up and then stretch the charge between them when they separate Juno, which arrived at Jupiter in 2016, got much closer to the giant planet’s cloud tops than previous missions.

Becker and her team turned the spacecraft’s navigation camera — which normally observes stars to track Juno’s position — on Jupiter’s nightside in February 2018. To the team’s surprise, the clouds crackled with electricity.