Amazing images taken by the new James Webb Space Telescope, and revealed to the public this week, show the planet Jupiter in all its glory. Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system, and the fifth in distance from the sun. It is twice as large as all the other stars combined. In an attempt to explain the proportions between the stars, NASA spokesmen stated that if the Earth was the size of a grape, Jupiter would be the size of a basketball.
Now, NASA’s Space Telescope has captured images showing Jupiter’s giant storms, its halos and dim rings. “We’ve never seen Jupiter like this. It’s just amazing,” said planetary astronomer Imka DePatter, professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. “To be honest, we didn’t expect the images to be this good.”
De Pater led the observations of Jupiter together with Thierry Fouche, a professor at the Paris Observatory, as part of an international collaboration. The photos were taken already in July and published this week by NASA, which called them “huge news from a huge star”.
“It’s amazing that we can see details of Jupiter along with its rings, tiny satellites, and even galaxies in one of the images,” De Pater said in a statement to the media.
The sophisticated telescope is named after James A. Webb, who ran the American space agency from 1961 to 1968, when it was still in its infancy. The telescope, which was launched into space last year, is the product of an international collaboration led by NASA, alongside the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. Last month, NASA released the first set of images and data captured and collected by the revolutionary telescope, revealing a dazzling cosmic display of colliding galaxies and a star dying.
Two images of Jupiter published this week consist of several images captured by the telescope with a special camera equipped with infrared filters, which show many details of the planet. Since infrared light is invisible to the human eye, the images were artificially colored to translate them into the visible color sequence and make the various details stand out, according to NASA.
Unlike Earth, Jupiter has no solid ground. It is a gas giant composed mostly of hydrogen and helium. Scientists think it has the same basic ingredients as the Sun, but unlike it, it never grew big enough to ignite. It also has some rings, but unlike Saturn’s they are fainter and made of space dust rather than ice.
In a wide view, the new images show Jupiter with its faint rings, as well as two tiny moons, called Amalthea and Adrastia. “This single image sums up the scientific achievements of our Jupiter system program, which studies the dynamics and chemistry of Jupiter itself, its rings and its satellite system,” Pusha said.
Jupiter, one of which lasts about ten hours, has at least 50 moons. The big four – Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto – were first observed in 1610 by the Italian physicist Galileo Galilei. The images also captured Jupiter’s well-known Great Red Spot, which appears white in photographs because it reflects sunlight, according to NASA. The Great Red Spot is a storm larger than the diameter of the entire Earth that has been raging on the planet for centuries.
As part of a renewed era in space exploration, NASA announced last week that it has identified 13 potential landing zones on our moon, and that it intends to send its astronauts back there as part of the Artemis program. At the same time, an audio clip shared by NASA over the weekend of what it called “Remix sounds” of a black hole, caused astonishment. The clip was edited so it could be heard by humans, but NASA said the sound emanating from a cluster of galaxies some 240 million light-years away disproved the misconception that there are no sounds in space.