The James Webb Space Telescope continues to replace the famous Hubble by observing better than it in the near infrared. This time it is the manifestations of the currents in Jupiter’s atmosphere whose aspects and understanding are being renewed.
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If Galileo was the first to observe Saturn’s rings, he did not understand what he was seeing with his telescope, and although Jupiter was closer to Earth, he had not yet observed the famous Great Red Spot (GTR). It was Jean-Dominique Cassini, a Savoyard astronomer and engineer naturalized as a Frenchman in 1673, who did so for the first time in 1665. Several observations of the GTR also enabled him to determine the rotation period of Jupiter and to prove it.
Like Saturn, Jupiter is a predominantly gaseous world with fascinating analogies to weather phenomena on Earth. In addition to space missions such as the Voyager, Galileo and Juno probes, the Hubble Telescope and today the James Webb have also peered into the secrets of Jupiter’s atmosphere at different wavelengths.
As part of the Early Release Science program – co-led by planetary scientist Imke de Pater (famous for her paper on planetary science) from the University of California at Berkeley and Thierry Fouchet from the Paris Observatory – a team of astronomers has just put together new discoveries about Jupiter using James-Webb, as explained in a paper published in Nature Astronomy.
A jet stream more than 4,800 kilometers wide
The observations were carried out with the NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) in July 2022 with images of Jupiter taken 10 hours apart and in four different filters.
In NASA’s press release announcing the discovery of a high-speed jet stream spanning more than 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers) across Jupiter’s equator, says lead author Ricardo Hueso of the University of the Country Basque in Bilbao, Spain According to the study, regarding Webb’s observations of Jupiter, “it was something that took us completely by surprise.” What we have always seen as fuzzy nebulae in Jupiter’s atmosphere now appear as sharp features that we can trace along with the planet’s rapid rotation.
The James-Webb now appears to be an excellent tool for tracking the complex dynamics of layers and turbulent bands in Jupiter’s atmosphere. The jet stream discovered is moving at about 315 miles per hour, twice the wind of a Category 5 hurricane on Earth. It is located about 40 kilometers above the clouds in Jupiter’s lower stratosphere.