Stunning images of Jupiter shown by NASA’s James Webb Telescope

Now, the Webb Telescope has captured images showing giant storms, aurora borealis and faint rings in more detail.

“We’ve never seen Jupiter like this before. Everything is incredible,” He said Planetary astronomer Imke de Pater, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. “We weren’t really expecting it to be this good, honestly,” she added. statement.

De Pater led the observations of Jupiter with Thierry Foucher, a professor at the Paris Observatory, as part of an international collaboration. The images were taken in July and published by NASA on Monday Call Theirs is “giant news from a giant planet.”

NASA unveils first images from the James Webb Space Telescope

“It’s really cool that we can see details about Jupiter, with its rings, small moons, and even galaxies in one image,” de Pater said in the statement.

The 10 billion dollar telescope is named James E. Webbwho ran 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 photos and data obtained by the revolutionary telescope, revealing a bright cosmic display of colliding galaxies and a dying star.

The two images released of Jupiter this week, a composite of several web images, were taken by the telescope’s near-infrared camera, which has infrared filters that display details of the planet. Infrared light is invisible to the human eye, NASA said, the images have been artificially colored to translate into the visible spectrum and highlight features of Jupiter. Images processed by citizen scientist Judy Schmidt.

Unlike Earth, Jupiter has no solid surface and is instead a gas giant, composed mostly of hydrogen and helium. It is believed to contain the same basic ingredients as a star but never grew large enough to catch fire. It also has several rings, but unlike Saturn’s, they are much fainter and consist of space dust rather than ice.

From a wide perspective, the new images show Jupiter with its faint rings and two small moons, called Amalthea and Adrastea.

“This image sums up the science of our Jupiter system program, which studies the dynamics and chemistry of Jupiter itself, its rings, and its satellite system,” said astronomer Foucher.

Take a cosmic tour inside images captured by NASA’s Webb Telescope

Jupiter, where a day is about 10 hours long, has at least 50 moons. The four biggerIo, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, were first observed in 1610 by the Italian physicist Galileo Galilei.

NASA said the images also capture Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, which appears white in the images because it reflects sunlight. The Great Red Spot is a storm larger than Earth and has been raging for centuries.

In a seemingly renewed age of space exploration, NASA is too He said Last week, it identified 13 candidate landing areas on Earth’s moon, as it prepares to send astronauts there under its Artemis program.

This will be and will be the first mission to return crew members to the lunar surface since the Apollo missions of 1969 to 1972. included The first woman and person of color to set foot on the moon.

Meanwhile, an audio clip shared by NASA this weekend of what it called the remixed sounds of a black hole sparked a fright. The sound has been edited for humans to hear and amplified, but NASA said the sound, which emanates from a galaxy cluster about 240 million light-years away, defies the misconception that there is no sound in space.