![]() Hopefully, that'll give us a pretty clear picture of those wild Jovian winds. It's also why Hueso and fellow researchers hope to compare what the JWST's infrared vision has seen among Jupiter's high-altitude atmospheric layers - which revealed the new jet stream via some cloud-related features - with what the Hubble Space Telescope has already seen in deeper layers. This means wind speeds in different layers are probably contributing to the giant planet's tumultuous climate. And, importantly for science investigations, Jupiter's atmosphere is layered, like Earth's. ![]() Jupiter is notorious for its extreme weather you might've heard of Jupiter's Great Red Spot, for instance, which is a never-ending, enormous storm that's so huge it's visible from our vantage point on Earth with a regular old optical telescope. "What we have always seen as blurred hazes in Jupiter’s atmosphere now appear as crisp features that we can track along with the planet’s fast rotation," Hueso said. In fact, all of those 2022 Jupiter images might help researchers deduce what goes on in the skies of the apricot-striped orb. What could this mean?Īccording to the team, this newfound jet stream on Jupiter - that's blasting away at about twice the speed of a Category 5 hurricane on Earth and sits right above the equator - might shed some light on the planet's turbulent atmosphere. “Everywhere Webb will look, we will see something new."It’s amazing to me that, after years of tracking Jupiter’s clouds and winds from numerous observatories, we still have more to learn," Leigh Fletcher of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, a member of the new study, said in the statement. “Looking at the universe with Webb will be like looking at a familiar photo with a different set of glasses that allow us to see new details in that photo that we had never seen before,” Mercedes Lopez-Morales, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, told Smithsonian magazine’s Brian Handwerk in July. Scientists are now studying the Webb images and data in hopes of learning even more meanwhile, NASA’s Juno orbiter is also observing the planet. “It’s really remarkable that we can see details on Jupiter together with its rings, tiny satellites and even galaxies in one image,” de Pater says in the statement.įor all that we do know about Jupiter, there are still a lot of mysteries surrounding the gas giant, which is the fifth planet from the sun. Galaxies are visible as fuzzy specks in the lower background, “photobombing” the image, per NASA. ![]() The Great Red Spot-a massive storm that’s been raging on Jupiter for more than a century and could “swallow Earth,” per NASA-actually appears white in the image.įor the other photograph, Webb took a wider field of view that shows two of Jupiter’s moons, Amalthea and Adrastea, and the very faint rings of space dust that encircle the planet. Webb captured shining auroras, clouds and swirling hazes. One of the images shows Jupiter on its own, with clearly defined bands of light pink, dusky blue and white covering the expansive planet that’s about 87,000 miles in diameter. James Webb Space Telescope composite image of JupiterĬourtesy of NASA, ESA, CSA, Jupiter ERS Team / Image processing by Ricardo Hueso (UPV/EHU) and Judy Schmidt But with some digital adjustments, Schmidt and other image processors got the job done. Near-infrared data from Jupiter is difficult to work with because of how fast the planet is rotating, according to NASA. One of those scientists is Judy Schmidt, a California resident who has no formal educational background in astronomy but fell in love with image processing 10 years ago, per NASA. The camera sent back infrared light data from Jupiter, which is invisible to the human eye, so scientists then had to map the data onto the visible spectrum to produce the images. NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency unveiled the two new images of Jupiter this week, both captured by the telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera, which can peer through the haze of space dust and uncover details beyond the visible light spectrum that human eyes can detect. “We hadn’t really expected it to be this good, to be honest,” says Imke de Pater, a planetary astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, who co-led the Jupiter observation project, in a statement. Webb’s composite photos of the gas giant are so impressive that even scientists were awe-struck. Now, the high-tech device has snapped striking new photos of something a bit closer to home: Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. Since launching in December 2021, the powerful James Webb Space Telescope has already captured dramatic images of colorful galaxies, stunning nebulae and other breathtaking celestial bodies in the distant universe. ![]()
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