The world’s newest and largest space telescope shows Jupiter like never before, auroras and all.
Scientists released the features of the largest planet in the solar system on Monday.
The James Webb Space Telescope took the photos in July, capturing unprecedented views of Jupiter’s northern and southern auroras and swirling polar fog.
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a storm big enough to swallow Earth, stands out brightly alongside countless smaller storms. One wide-field image is particularly dramatic, showing the faint rings around the planet as well as two tiny moons against a bright background of galaxies.
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot stands out brightly in these images from the James Webb Space Telescope. Photograph: NASA, ESA, CSA, Jupiter ERS Team; image processing by Judy Schmidt.
“We’ve never seen Jupiter like this. It’s all pretty incredible,” planetary astronomer Imke de Pater of the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement. She helped lead the observation. “We didn’t really expect it to be this good, to be honest.”
The infrared images were artificially colored blue, white, green, yellow and orange, according to the US-French research team, to highlight the features.
NASA and the European Space Agency’s $10 billion successor to the Hubble Space Telescope blasted off late last year and has been observing the cosmos in the infrared since the summer. Scientists hope to witness the dawn of the universe with Webb, looking back to when the first stars and galaxies formed 13.7 billion years ago.
The observatory is located 1 m miles (1.6 m km) from Earth.