We’re not the only world with dazzling auroras. Moons, planets, and even comets can have their own light shows, and some are very different from what we have on Earth. Auroras can be big or small, faint or bright, sputtering, steady, and virtually every color of the rainbow. These swirls and arcs often reveal hidden aspects of other worlds, and sometimes, they pose mysteries of their own.
Most auroras in the Solar System are powered by the solar wind: a torrent of charged particles constantly unleashed by our Sun. On Earth, the aurora borealis (northern lights) and aurora australis (southern lights) both get triggered when the solar wind dumps energy into our magnetic field, causing ions to rain down over the north and south poles. When this shower hits our atmosphere, it excites gases like oxygen and nitrogen into giving off an ethereal glow.
But not every aurora works the same way. Though all auroras are powered by charged particles running into something, some don’t rely on the solar wind. Others don’t depend on thick atmospheres, and a few don’t even need strong magnetic fields.
Take Venus. Scientists have seen faint green and blue auroras from our neighboring world, but it has no global magnetic field. Instead, Venus has local magnetic fields that form when the solar wind interacts with ions in the planet’s atmosphere. These fields are weak and patchy, but they’re still able to capture other solar wind particles and make the sky glow.
Mars takes this one step further: It has no global magnetic field and only a thin atmosphere, but it boasts at least four different kinds of auroras. One appears on the sunlit side of the planet, another extends like ribbons across its skies, and a third is caused by the solar wind getting trapped by weak magnetic fields in the Martian crust. The fourth kind of aurora, which sometimes spreads over the entire planet, was spotted by the Perseverance rover in 2024. This marked the first time an aurora has ever been observed from the surface of another world.
Compared to Jupiter, though, these spectacles are like candles in the wind. Auroras on Jupiter are the most powerful in the Solar System and up to 1,000 times brighter than those on Earth. Though they mostly shine in the ultraviolet and infrared, someone standing atop Jupiter’s cloud deck might be able to spot faint colors in its night sky. The glows would look red and possibly also purple and blue because of the hydrogen in the planet’s atmosphere.