Jupiter as you’ve never seen it before in new images from the Webb Space Telescope

The Web Space Telescope Filmed on the planet Jupiter as never seen before. The gas giant shines brightly in the latest set of photos from Webb, showing bright auroras at its north and south poles, massive, centuries-old storms, very faint rings, and two of the planet’s 79 known moons..

Near Infrared Camera Web (NIRCam) captured the images on July 27, and presented Scientists’ unsurpassed views of Jupiter. “We didn’t really expect them to be like this Very wellhonest‘, he said in a Release Imke de Pater, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, who has led recent observations of Jupiter. “We’ve never seen Jupiter like this before. It’s Very amazing.”

Jupiter is always a wonder. through the years, The Juno spacecraft has sent incredible images From the largest planet in the solar system, its swirling winds and gas streaks appear. But how much detail did the photos reveal? Web is another thing. This is due to Webb’s ability to collect infrared light, a wavelength that is invisible to the human eye but can travel through gas and dust that would otherwise obscure it. the light . The pictures you see Here I know Translate to the visible spectrum So we can see it and highlight specific features of Jupiter.

“Although we have already seen many of these features on Jupiter, the infrared wavelengths of JWST gives us a new perspective,” said de Pater. Jupiter contains the brightest auroras in the solar system, and the images reveal auroral emissions of ionized hydrogen as high-altitude fog over the planet’s north and south poles.

Another major feature is Jupiter’s famous storm, the Great Red Spot. It is believed that this high pressure storm was brewing For hundreds of years, it rotates counterclockwise. It appears in the pictures as a white dot because it reflects a lot of sunlight, According to NASA. “The brightness here indicates a high altitude, so the Great Red Spot has high-altitude haze, as in the equatorial region,” Heidi Hamill, a multidisciplinary scientist at the University of California, said in a statement. Web for monitoring the solar system. “The bright white ‘spots’ and ‘streaks’ are likely high-altitude cloud tops from intense convective storms.”

The Webb also revealed the dark ring system of Jupiter, which is a million times fainter than Jupiter itself, and the moons Amalthea and Adrastia. sSmall bright spots in the background are distant galaxies. “It’s really unusual to be able to see the details of Jupiter, its rings, its small moons, and even the galaxies in a single image,” de Pater said.

expected to be Webb works while about 20 years And maybe more. The telescope is currently at a certain point Celestial that is 1.5 million km away from that monitors nearby objects and some distant lights in the universe.