The world’s newest and largest space telescope reveals images showing views of the largest planet “never seen” before.
The world’s newest and largest space telescope has released photographs showing unprecedented views of Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system.
Scientists on Monday released photographs captured by the James Webb Space Telescope in July, showing Jupiter’s aurora borealis and southern lights and swirling polar fog.
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a storm big enough to swallow Earth, stands out brightly alongside countless smaller storms.
One wide-field image is particularly dramatic, showing the faint rings around the planet as well as two tiny moons against a bright background of galaxies.
“We’ve never seen Jupiter like this. It’s all pretty amazing,” said planetary astronomer Imke de Pater of the University of California, Berkeley, who helped lead the observations.
“We really didn’t expect it to be this good, to be honest,” he added in a statement.
The infrared images were artificially colored blue, white, green, yellow and orange, according to the US-French research team, to highlight the features.
NASA and the European Space Agency’s $10 billion successor to the Hubble Space Telescope blasted off late last year and has been observing the cosmos in the infrared since the summer.
Scientists hope to witness the dawn of the universe with Webb, looking back to when the first stars and galaxies formed 13.7 billion years ago.
The observatory is located one million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth.