Comment Stunning images captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope show Jupiter in new glory. Fifth in order 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 have never seen Jupiter like this. It’s all incredible,” said planetary astronomer Imke de Pater, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. “We didn’t really 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 photos were taken in July and released on Monday by NASA, which called them “giant news from a giant planet”. NASA unveils the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope “It is truly remarkable that we can see details of Jupiter along with its rings, tiny 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-nascent 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 launched in 2021. In July, NASA released the first set of color images and data taken by the revolutionary telescope and revealed a glittering cosmic display of colliding galaxies and a dying star that captured hearts and imaginations on earth. The two images, a composite of several images from Webb, released of Jupiter this week were taken by the telescope’s near-infrared camera, which has special infrared filters that show the planet’s details. Since infrared light is invisible to the human eye, the images were artificially colored to translate into the visible spectrum and make Jupiter’s features stand out, NASA said. The images were edited by citizen scientist Judy Schmidt. See the light waves, eddies and eddies in Jupiter’s atmosphere — as well as the dark ring system, a million times fainter than the planet! Two moons of Jupiter, including one that is only about 12 miles (20 km) wide, are on 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, composed mostly of hydrogen and helium. It is thought to have the same basic ingredients as a star, but has never become 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 view, the new images show Jupiter with its faint rings and two tiny moons called Amalthea and Adrastea. “This unique image summarizes the science of the 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 of images captured by NASA’s Webb Telescope Jupiter, where a day is about 10 hours, 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 the photos 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 a seemingly renewed era of space exploration, earlier this month NASA also said it had identified 13 candidate landing sites on Earth’s moon as it prepares to send astronauts back there under the Artemis program. It will be the first mission to return a crew to the lunar surface since Apollo in 1969 and will include the first woman and person of color to set foot 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 blended sounds of a black hole caused awe. The sound has been processed to be heard by humans and amplified, but NASA said the sound, which came from a galaxy cluster about 240 million light-years away, defied the misconception that there is no sound in space. The misconception that there is no sound in space comes because most of space is a vacuum, providing no way for sound waves to travel. A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we’ve captured 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
