Science brought a new achievement: the space telescope james webb, the newest and largest in the world, is showing Jupiter in a way never seen before. The successor to the space telescope Hubble NASA and the European Space Agency, valued at $10 billionwas put into operation at the end of last year: it orbits 1.6 million kilometers from Earth and has been observing the cosmos in the infrared ever since.
Some astronomers who are part of the team that operates the telescope on Monday published images of Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, which were taken last month. You can see the northern and southern lights of Jupiter and the swirling polar haze.
This allowed us to better observe some phenomena around the planet, such as Jupiter’s Great Red Spot: This is a storm large enough to engulf the Earth and stands out alongside countless smaller storms; as well as the faint rings around the planet, as well as two small moons against a bright background of galaxies.
The telescope was able to capture these images thanks to a infrared camera near (NIRCam). It has three special infrared filters to be able to observe those details.
“We have never seen Jupiter like this. It’s all pretty amazing. “We really didn’t expect it to be that good, to be honest,” the planetary astronomer celebrated in a statement. Imke de Pater, of the University of California, Berkeley, who led the observation. The infrared images were artificially colored in blue, white, green, yellow and orange by the French-American research team, to highlight features and details.
Telescope data collection requires scientists to impart a certain order to it. Information about the brightness of light that telescopes detect reaches the Space Telescope Science Institutewhich is Webb’s science and mission operations center, in the form of raw data that is then processed into calibrated files and delivered to the Mikulski Archive of Space Telescopes to be disseminated. Scientists deal with translating that information into images.
Scientists hope to witness the dawn of the universe with Webb, looking back to when the first stars and galaxies 13.7 billion years ago.
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