The NIRCam obtained images of Jupiter 10 hours apart-one Jupiter day-in four different filters, each uniquely able to detect changes in small features at different altitudes of Jupiter’s atmosphere. “Even though various ground-based telescopes, spacecraft like NASA’s Juno and Cassini, and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have observed the Jovian system’s changing weather patterns, Webb has already provided new findings on Jupiter’s rings, satellites, and its atmosphere,” de Pater says. The ERS observations of the Jupiter system are jointly led by Imke de Pater, professor emerita of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and Thierry Fouchet from the Observatory of Paris. Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) captured the new images of Jupiter in July 2022 as part of the Early Release Science (ERS) program. The discovery of this jet stream is giving insights into how the layers of Jupiter’s famously turbulent atmosphere interact with each other, and how the Webb telescope is uniquely capable of tracking those features. These winds flow at nearly twice the speed of the winds in the visible cloud layer (blue arrows) 20 miles below, as measured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. “What we have always seen as blurred hazes in Jupiter’s atmosphere now appear as crisp features that we can track along with the planet’s fast rotation and move much faster than the typical velocities found in Jupiter’s equator at cloud level.” Near-infrared observations of Jupiter by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (background) revealed previously unsuspected high-elevation winds (red arrows) akin to Earth’s jet stream in a narrow zone above the equator. “This is something that totally surprised us,” says Hueso of the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain. This means that for every kilometer above these visible clouds, the wind speed increases by 7 to 10 kilometers per hour, according to Ricardo Hueso, lead author of a paper describing the findings published in the journal Nature Astronomy. The high-speed jet stream, which is traveling at 320 miles per hour (515 kilometers per hour) and is more than 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers) wide and sits over Jupiter’s equator, 15 to 30 miles (25 to 50 kilometers) above the main cloud deck familiar from optical photos.īased on observations by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, winds in the visible cloud layer blow at about 180 mph (250 km/hour). NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has discovered a fast-moving jet stream in Jupiter’s atmosphere that is blowing twice as fast as the visible cloud layers below it, creating wind shears that far exceed anything seen on Earth. University University of California, Berkeley
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |