ALMA observations of the spatial distribution of CO and HCN in the stratosphere of Jupiter
Résumé
Jupiter's stratospheric chemistry and dynamics are poorly understood as a function of latitude. The Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet impacts in Jupiter's atmosphere in 1994 have offered us with a unique means to characterize Jupiter's stratospheric chemistry and dynamics. We can indeed use the delivery at 44°S of the long-lived species HCN, CO, H2O, and CS and the subsequent temporal evolution of their spatial distribution as constraints for vertical and meridional mixing, zonal winds and chemistry as a function of latitude.
We mapped HCN and CO in Jupiter's stratosphere with ALMA in March 2017. These observations have already been used in Cavalié et al. (2021) and Benmahi et al. (2021) to derive the stratospheric zonal wind field. In this paper, we use the same observations to retrieve the vertical and meridional distributions of HCN and CO, almost 25 years after the comet impacts. We will present the spatial distributions of both species and discuss the implications on Jupiter's stratospheric chemistry, and vertical and horizontal mixing.