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Stunning images taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope show Jupiter in new glory.
Fifth in line from the Sun, Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system, more than twice as large as all the others combined. If Earth were the size of a grape, Jupiter would be the size of a basketball, NASA says.
Now, the Webb Telescope has captured images that show its giant storms, auroras and faint rings in more detail.
“We’ve never seen Jupiter like this. It’s all pretty amazing,” said planetary astronomer Imke de Pater, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. “We really didn’t expect it to be this good, to be honest,” he added in a statement.
De Pater led the observations of Jupiter with Thierry Fouchet, a professor at the Paris Observatory, as part of an international collaboration. The images were taken in July and released Monday by NASA, which called them “giant news from a giant planet.”
NASA presents the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope
“It is truly remarkable that we can see details about Jupiter along with its rings, small moons and even galaxies in one image,” de Pater said in the statement.
The $10 billion telescope is named after James E. Webb, who led the then fledgling US space agency from 1961 to 1968. The telescope is an international collaboration led by NASA, along with the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, and was launched in 2021.
In July, NASA released the first set of full-color images and data obtained by the ground-breaking telescope, revealing a dazzling cosmic spectacle of colliding galaxies and a dying star that captured hearts and imaginations on Earth .
The two images, a composite of several Webb images, released of Jupiter this week were taken by the telescope’s near-infrared camera, which has special infrared filters that show details of the planet. Because infrared light is invisible to the human eye, the images were artificially colored to translate them into the visible spectrum and make Jupiter’s features stand out, NASA said. The images were processed by citizen scientist Judy Schmidt.
See the bright waves, eddies and vortices of Jupiter’s atmosphere, as well as the dark ring system, a million times fainter than the planet! Two moons of Jupiter, including one only 20 km (12 mi) in diameter, are to the left. pic.twitter.com/o7XYOMdsq5
— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) August 22, 2022
Unlike Earth, Jupiter has no solid surface and is instead a gas giant, made mostly of hydrogen and helium. It is believed to have the same basic ingredients as a star, but never grew massive enough to ignite. It also has several rings, but unlike Saturn’s, they are fainter and made of space dust rather than ice.
In a wide-field view, the new images show Jupiter with its faint rings and two tiny moons called Amalthea and Adrastea.
“This image summarizes the science of our Jupiter System Program, which studies the dynamics and chemistry of Jupiter itself, its rings and its satellite system,” said astronomer Fouchet.
Take a cosmic tour through images captured by NASA’s Webb Telescope
Jupiter, where a day is about 10 hours long, has at least 50 moons. The four largest are named: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto were first observed by the Italian physicist Galileo Galilei in 1610.
The images also capture Jupiter’s iconic Great Red Spot, which appears white in photographs as it reflects sunlight, NASA says. The Great Red Spot is actually a giant storm larger than the size of Earth that has been raging for centuries.
In an apparently renewed era of space exploration, earlier this month NASA also said it had identified 13 candidate landing regions on Earth’s moon as it prepares to send astronauts there under its program Artemis.
It will be the first mission to return crew to the lunar surface since Apollo in 1969 and will include the first woman and person of color to walk on the moon.
Later this month, @NASA will launch Artemis I, the first in a series of missions that will return American astronauts to the Moon, including the first woman and person of color. We have incredible opportunities in space.
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) August 20, 2022
Meanwhile, an audio clip shared by NASA this weekend of what it called the remixed sounds of a black hole sparked awe. The audio has been edited for human hearing and amplified, but NASA said the sound, emanating from a galaxy cluster some 240 million light-years away, challenged the misconception that there is no sound in space
The misconception that there is no sound in space originates from the fact that most of space is a void, offering no way for sound waves to travel. A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we’ve picked up the real sound. Here it is amplified, and mixed with other data, to hear a black hole! pic.twitter.com/RobcZs7F9e
— NASA Exoplanets (@NASAExoplanets) August 21, 2022