![]() ![]() The greenish areas around the poles come from hazes in the planet’s atmosphere located 60 to 120 miles (100 to 200 km) high. These emissions come from ionized hydrogen atoms that extend up to 625 miles (1,000 km) above the cloud tops. Jupiter’s massive auroral ovals appear as reddish glows near the giant’s north and south poles. The image also reveals the transition between the banded structures seen at equatorial and mid-latitude regions that earthbound observers know so well, plus more complex vortices at higher latitudes. The cyan hues, meanwhile, reveal clouds buried deeper in the jovian atmosphere, showing light reflected from the planet’s main cloud level at a pressure of about one bar (roughly the atmospheric pressure at Earth’s surface). Smaller storms across the planet appear whitish or reddish white. For the same reason, the massive Great Red Spot in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere shows up as a bright oval. The Equatorial Zone spans the planet’s girth and looks bright white because its high-altitude hazes reflect lots of sunlight. In the striking close-up directly above, taken through three different filters, Jupiter displays numerous cloud bands, as well as storms and auroral emissions. JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) captured two images of our solar system’s largest planet. “We hadn’t really expected it to be this good.” “We’ve never seen Jupiter like this it’s all quite incredible,” said principal investigator Imke de Pater of the University of California, Berkeley, in a statement. The resulting images reveal a planet both familiar and exotic. On July 27, astronomers targeted Jupiter with the telescope’s powerful infrared eyes. And the observatory’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) has even discovered carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of exoplanet WASP-39 b - the first definitive detection of this gas in a planet beyond our solar system.īut JWST has set its sights closer to home, too. ![]() JWST has already captured images of galaxies so far from Earth that cosmic expansion has shifted their light well into the infrared part of the spectrum, which the telescope is built to detect. And NASA’s flagship space telescope has not disappointed. When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) blasted off from French Guiana on Christmas Day 2021, astronomers anticipated it would deliver breathtaking images of distant galaxies and star-forming regions, as well as analyze the chemical makeups of exoplanet atmospheres. ![]()
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