Lightning Strikes on Jupiter Are 100 Times as Powerful as Those on Earth, a New Study Suggests

Scientists finally have a clearer picture of the gas giant’s intense storms

Sara Hashemi | Daily Correspondent

April 6, 2026

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Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, has massive storms that match its size. These storms—some of which can last centuries—unleash powerful bolts of lightning. But understanding the full strength of these strikes has been difficult because of the planet’s hefty clouds.

Now, thanks to data from NASA’s Juno spacecraft and a fortuitous lull in some storms, scientists have calculated that Jupiter regularly sees lightning flashes that pack 100 times the energetic punch of those on Earth—and potentially even stronger. The findings, published March 20 in the journal AGU Advances, can help scientists better understand the giant planet’s storms.

Previous missions have detected lightning on Jupiter, but those spacecraft could only detect the most powerful flashes on the planet’s dark side. In 2016, Juno began orbiting the planet, and one of its instruments can pick up radio waves produced by the powerful zaps, although the tool wasn’t designed to study lightning.

Jupiter, however, has a turbulent atmosphere. Multiple storms are usually occurring across the planet, making it hard for Juno to tell which one produced the lightning it sensed, and therefore impossible to determine the power of each strike.

It’s like hearing pops at a Chinese New Year’s parade and not knowing if the sounds came from exploding popcorn a few feet away or firecrackers a block away, says Michael Wong, a study co-author and planetary scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, in a statement.

But Wong and his colleagues got lucky in 2021 and 2022. Storms let up in part of Jupiter’s northern region, allowing the researchers to zero in on one storm at a time using the Hubble Space Telescope, Juno’s camera and images from citizen scientists. “Because we had a precise location, we were able to just say, ‘OK, we know where it is. We’re directly measuring the power,’” Wong says in the statement.

Juno analyzed four storms and found that they averaged three lightning strikes per second. Overall, the spacecraft detected 613 pulses, which ranged in power from a bolt on Earth to 100 or more times that energy, the team found. For context, a flash of lightning on our home planet unleashes about one billion joules of energy, an amount that could power around 200 homes for an hour.

“It was so gratifying to work through the statistics and see that with our Juno data, we were really capturing the majority of lightning pulses at radio wavelengths,” Wong tells Charles Q. Choi at Space.com. “Before, there was some question about whether we might be catching only the strongest pulses and missing weaker ones.”

What’s more, the new measurements could be an underestimate, since the Jovian bolts probably release other types of energy, such as thermal, acoustic and chemical energy. The researchers say that the giant planet’s bolts might be up to 10,000 times as powerful as those on Earth.

“It’s like if the entire lightning flash is the Loch Ness Monster,” Wong tells Robin George Andrews at Science. “We can only speculate about how big the monster is.”

Further work is still needed to determine how Jupiter generates lightning, although the findings can help scientists understand how heat gets transported from lower parts of the atmosphere to its upper regions via a process called convection.

On Earth, moist air is more buoyant than dry air, because it’s mostly made of nitrogen, which is heavier than water, Wong tells Space.com. Jupiter, however, has an atmosphere rich with hydrogen—lighter than water—which means moist air is harder to move upward. So more energy is required to spark a storm on Jupiter than on Earth, and more energy gets released when one does arise at the top of the gas giant’s atmosphere.

The work also has implications for the search for life, since the energy carried by bolts can trigger chemical reactions that could lead to organisms. While Jupiter probably can’t support life as we know it, similar flashes on a more habitable world could possibly spark life. Some scientists suspect that’s how microbes got kick-started on Earth.

“If you want to have complex chemistry, it can only come from volcanoes or lightning,” says Daniel Mitchard, a lightning physicist at Cardiff University in Wales, who wasn’t involved in the new work, to Science. “The more energetic the lightning, the more chemistry you’re producing.”

Sara Hashemi | Read More

Sara Hashemi is a science writer and fact-checker currently based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Sierra, The Body, Maisonneuve magazine and more.