This is Scientific American 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

39 years ago, Voyager 1 swung by Jupiter on its journey to

interstellar space.

And as it did, it picked up spooky low frequency radio signals like this.

The whistlers, as they're known, were radio broadcasts from unusual natural antennas, lightning bolts, which act like radio transmitters with current moving through a channel.

Along with photos of the dark side of the planet,

the whistlers confirm the existence of lightning on Jupiter,

but the limited observations made it hard to pin down where electrical storms gathered,

and the bolts were thought to be rare, compared to Earth.

Now the Juno spacecraft has detected the first high-frequency radio signals and 1,600 new whistlers, which together suggests lightning on Jupiter is much more common than

scientists thought and a lot more similar to Earth lightning too.

The discharges also appear to be between clouds containing liquid water and others containing

water ice, the same kind of conditions for cloud-to-cloud lightning here on Earth.

The findings appear in the journal's Nature and Nature Astronomy.

There is one twist to this Jovian weather story, though.

Jupiter's lightning storms congregate near the planet's poles, not its equator. That's the opposite of Earth, and a detail that makes

this familiar phenomenon still seem a bit otherworldly.

Thanks for listening. For Scientific American 60 Second Science. I'm Christopher Antoniati.