The UVIS images show multiple overlapping exposures of this torus, each in the characteristic light emitted by sulfur and oxygen atoms. All of these emissions are invisible to the naked eye and can only be seen in the ultraviolet light that the CU telescopes detect. We see the entire donut of glowing gas in all its invisible colors. One Day in the Life of Jupiter's Io Torus. Each vertical line shows one type of ionized atom in the Io plasma torus.
Shorter wavelengths are on the left and longer on the right.
Click Here to play a movie of the Io torus as observed on 11 November 2000. Because the atoms giving off the light are trapped by Jupiter's tilted magnetic field, the torus wobbles back and forth during the course of a Jupiter day. QuickTime 4 is needed to play these movies. In the first two months of observing Jupiter, we saw the Jupiter system significantly larger, with clear brightness variations. The aurora brightness has been changing daily.