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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on Monday shared that its James Webb Space Telescope has captured new images of the planet Jupiter and “Webb’s Jupiter observations will give scientists even more clues to Jupiter’s inner life."
The world's newest and biggest space telescope is showing Jupiter as never before, as scientists released the shots Monday of the solar system's biggest planet, an Associated Press report said.
NASA Webb Telescope on Twitter shared, “Make way for the king of the solar system! New Webb images of Jupiter highlight the planet's features, including its turbulent Great Red Spot (shown in white here), in amazing detail. These images were processed by citizen scientist Judy Schmidt."
Additionally, it said, “check out the bright waves, swirls, and vortices in Jupiter’s atmosphere — as well as the dark ring system, one million times fainter than the planet! Two moons of Jupiter, including one that’s only about 12 miles (20 km) across, are on the left."
One wide-field picture is particularly dramatic, showing the faint rings around the planet, as well as two tiny moons against a glittering background of galaxies, while “we've never seen Jupiter like this. It's all quite incredible," said planetary astronomer Imke de Pater, of the University of California, Berkeley, as he helped lead the observation.
“We hadn't really expected it to be this good, to be honest," he said. The infrared images were artificially coloured in blue, white, green, yellow and orange, according to the U.S.-French research team, to make the features stand out, the AP report said.
Interestingly, NASA and the European Space Agency's $10 billion successor to the Hubble Space Telescope rocketed away at the end of last year and has been observing the cosmos in the infrared since summer. Scientists hope to behold the dawn of the universe with Webb, peering all the way back to when the first stars and galaxies were forming 13.7 billion years ago. The observatory is positioned 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth, the report said.
(With inputs from Associated Press, NASA Website)