The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) surprised once more now with incredible images of the majestic and imposing planet Jupiter: the one of the giant storms, powerful winds, auroras and extreme conditions of temperature and pressure. There were two photographs of largest planet in the Solar System, those revealed by NASA on August 22.
In a NASA statement, which accompanies the images of Jupiter, it is explained that in the data thrown by the James Webb it is possible to observe various details of Jupiter in different filters.
Auroras high above the planet’s north and south poles can be seen in red filters, highlighting the light reflected from lower clouds and upper haze. They are also seen mists that swirl around the north and south poles that appear in yellow and green filters and in addition, you can also see a deepest main cloud in a filter assigned to blues.
You can also see the incredible Great Red Spot that has spent more than 400 years on the gaseous planet and that has been portrayed by other telescopes such as the Hubble in times past. In the images it appears white, like other clouds that reflect a lot of sunlight. This stain is so big that might swallow the earth, according to NASA.
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“The brightness in the images indicates a high altitude, so the Great Red Spot has high-altitude haze, as does the equatorial region,” Heidi Hammel, Webb Interdisciplinary Scientist for Solar System Observations and scientific vice president of AURA.
“The numerous Bright white ‘spots’ and ‘streaks’ are probably cloud tops high-altitude convective condensed storms,” Hammel said. In contrast, the dark belts north of the equatorial region have little cloud cover.
These images come from Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) at the James Webb Observatory, which has three specialized infrared filters that show details of the planet. The images have been manipulated in their edition and it has been mapped with light that can be distinguished in the visible spectrum, which is what we humans observe, since the infrared spectrum is invisible to the human eye.
The image was processed by scientists Judy Schmidt and Ricardo Hueso. Schmidt is in charge of translating the infrared data from James Webb into images visible to people, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Nasa. “At longer wavelengths they appear redder and at shorter wavelengths they appear bluer,” explained the space organization.
“To be honest, we really didn’t expect it to be that good,” said planetary astronomer Imke de Pater, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley for NASA. The scientist has led the observations of Jupiter with scientist Thierry Fouchet, professor at the Paris Observatory as part of an international collaboration for the James Webb Early Release Science program.
In a wider field view, the James Webb looks at Jupiter with its faint rings that are a million times fainter than the planet and two tiny moons called Amaltea and Adrastea. The fuzzy dots in the lower background are likely other galaxies, according to NASA.
“This image summarizes the science of our Jupiter system program, which studies the dynamics and chemistry of Jupiter itself, its rings, and its satellite system,” said scientist Fouchet.
Researchers have already begun to analyze the James Webb data on Jupiter to obtain new scientific results regarding the largest planet in our Solar System.
How does the James Webb deliver the data?
NASA explains that data from telescopes like the James Webb they do not arrive on Earth neatly packaged. This data arrives raw and contains information regarding the brightness of light from the space telescope’s detectors and the information reaches the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) which is the center of Webb’s mission and science operations.
STScI processes the data into calibrated files for scientific analysis and delivers it to the Archivo Mikulski for Space Telescopes for dissemination. Later, scientists translate that information into images like these during the course of their research as the scientists Ricardo Hueso and Judy Schmidt did with these images.
While the STScI team formally processes the James Webb images for official publication, non-professional astronomers known as citizen scientists often dive into the public data archive to retrieve and process the astronomical images.
