Images captured by the James Webb Telescope and released by the US space agency (NASA) on Monday (21) reveal details of the planet Jupiter as never seen before: with storms and auroras.

“We didn’t expect it to be this good. [o resultado]to be honest,” said the astronomer who leads the observations of the planet, Imke de Pater, with Thierry Fouchet, professor at the Paris Observatory, in an international collaboration.

According to an announcement from NASA, partner in this mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), through the images it is possible to observe storms such as the Great Red Spot, strong winds, moons, auroras and even other galaxies.

Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system, measuring over 142,000 kilometers in diameter. It is the fifth planet from the Sun, located between Mars and Saturn.

Red spot and moons
The Great Red Spot – a complex counter-clockwise storm – along with other clouds, appear as white images, due to reflected sunlight.

“The glow here indicates high altitude. So the Great Red Spot has high altitude haze, just like the equatorial region,” said Webb mission interdisciplinary scientist Heidi Hammel. dark bands also appear north of the equatorial region with little cloud cover.

The telescope also recorded the moons Amalthea and Adrastea and the possible effect of matter from Io, one of Jupiter’s best-known satellites, which, upon entering Jupiter’s atmosphere, would be responsible for auroras at the poles. south and north of the planet.

invisible rings

Images of Jupiter come from the observatory’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), which has three infrared filters. Since the data captured by Webb is invisible to the human eye, it must be processed in the visible spectrum. Thus, it was possible to record even the faint rings of the gaseous planet. According to NASA, “a million times weaker than the planet”.

All this in cooperation with citizen scientists, who are not necessarily skilled in astronomy, but who cooperate with specialist knowledge.

In this case, according to NASA, the mission relied on the work of young Judy Schmidt to translate Webb’s raw data into images.

Ten years ago, Judy was among the finalists of an ESA competition and since then has been collaborating on the processing of images, including those that have already been made available by another Webb precursor telescope, the Hubble.

According to NASA, all the material provided by James Webb should be studied by experts to try to unravel the dynamics and the weather system of the gas giant a little more.