We are beginning to reap the benefits of NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope, which has captured images of Jupiter in unprecedented detail.
Two infrared photos of the planet were shared by scientists on Monday, showing its northern and southern lights and the icy haze surrounding the planet.
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a massive anticyclonic storm that could easily swallow up Earth, is visible in the images as a solid white mass standing out from several smaller storm cells.
In the background of the images, two of Jupiter’s tiny moons are visible, along with distant galaxies.
“We’ve never seen Jupiter like this. It’s all quite incredible,” said planetary astronomer Imke de Pater of the University of California at Berkeley.
Jupiter is the fifth-furthest planet from the Sun. It is also a “gas giant” and the largest planet in the solar system.
One of the infrared images shows the planet with colorful artificial enhancements of green, blue, yellow, white, and orange, which make the planet’s features stand out.
The $10-billion James Webb Space Telescope was built in a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency. It ended up replacing the aging Hubble Space Telescope and was launched into space on December 25, 2021. Its operating position in space is 1 million miles away, a distance four times beyond our moon.
Scientists claimed the telescope would eventually be able to look back 13.7 billion years into spacetime, just 100 million years short of the “Big Bang.”
NASA administrator Bill Nelson called Webb a time machine that can provide “a better understanding of our universe and our place in it: who we are, what we are, the search that’s eternal.”
“We are going to discover incredible things that we never imagined,” Nelson said.
