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The world’s newest and most powerful space telescope shows Jupiter like never before, auroras and all
The world’s newest and largest space telescope shows Jupiter like never before, auroras and all. Scientists released images of the solar system’s largest planet on Monday.
The James Webb Space Telescope took the images in July and captured unprecedented views of Jupiter’s northern and southern lights and the swirling auroral haze. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a storm large enough to engulf Earth, stands out clearly next to countless smaller storms.
One wide-angle image is particularly dramatic, showing faint rings around the planet as well as two tiny moons against a glittering background of galaxies.
“We’ve never seen Jupiter like this before. It’s all pretty incredible,” said planetary astronomer Imke de Pater of the University of California, Berkeley, who helped lead the observations.
“To be honest, we really didn’t expect it to be this good,” she added in a statement.
The infrared images were artificially colored blue, white, green, yellow and orange to make the features stand out, according to the US-French research team.
NASA and the European Space Agency’s $10 billion successor to the Hubble Space Telescope took off late last year and has been observing the universe in infrared light since the summer. With Webb, scientists hope to see the dawn of the universe and peer back to the time when the first stars and galaxies formed 13.7 billion years ago.
The observatory is located 1 million miles (1.6 million km) from Earth.
