Stunning New Images Of Jupiter Reveal Atmosphere Details In Different Light
Stunning new images captured by two different telescopes are showing our solar system's largest planet in a new light.
The Gemini North telescope in Hawaii and the Hubble Space Telescope have captured Jupiter in visible, infrared and ultraviolet light, revealing striking atmospheric features of the gas giant in detail.
These include superstorms, massive cyclones and, of course, the Great Red Spot - the centuries-long storm in Jupiter's atmosphere so large it could swallow Earth.
These three portraits highlight the key advantage of multiwavelength astronomy: viewing planets and other astronomical objects at different wavelengths of light allows scientists to glean otherwise unavailable insights.
In the case of Jupiter, the planet has a vastly different appearance in the infrared, visible, and ultraviolet observations.
The planet's Great Red Spot is a prominent feature of the visible and ultraviolet images, but it is almost invisible at infrared wavelengths. Jupiter's counter-rotating bands of clouds, on the contrary, are clearly visible in all three views.
Observing the Great Red Spot at multiple wavelengths yields other surprises - the dark region in the infrared image is larger than the corresponding red oval in the visible image. This discrepancy arises because different structures are revealed by different wavelengths; the infrared observations show areas covered with thick clouds, while the visible and ultraviolet observations show the locations of chromophores - the particles that give the Great Red Spot its distinctive hue by absorbing blue and ultraviolet light.
The Great Red Spot isn't the only storm system visible in these images. The region sometimes nicknamed Red Spot Jr. (known to Jovian scientists as Oval BA) appears in both the visible and ultraviolet observations. This storm - to the bottom right of its larger counterpart - formed from the merger of three similar-sized storms in 2000.
In the visible-wavelength image, it has a clearly defined red outer rim with a white centre. In the infrared, however, Red Spot Jr. is invisible, lost in the larger band of cooler clouds, which appear dark in the infrared view.
Like the Great Red Spot, Red Spot Jr. is coloured by chromophores that absorb solar radiation at both ultraviolet and blue wavelengths, giving it a red colour in visible observations and a dark appearance at ultraviolet wavelengths.
Just above Red Spot Jr. in the visible observations, a Jovian superstorm appears as a diagonal white streak extending toward the right side of Jupiter's disk.
One atmospheric phenomenon that does feature prominently at infrared wavelengths is a bright streak in the northern hemisphere of Jupiter. This feature - a cyclonic vortex or perhaps a series of vortices - extends 72,000 kilometres (nearly 45,000 miles) in the east-west direction.
At visible wavelengths the cyclone appears dark brown, leading to these types of features being called 'brown barges' in images from NASA's Voyager spacecraft. At ultraviolet wavelengths, however, the feature is barely visible underneath a layer of stratospheric haze, which becomes increasingly dark toward the north pole.
Similarly, lined up below the brown barge, four large 'hot spots' appear bright in the infrared image but dark in both the visible and ultraviolet views.
Astronomers discovered such features when they observed Jupiter in infrared wavelengths for the first time in the 1960s.
As well as providing a beautiful scenic tour of Jupiter, these observations provide insights about the planet's atmosphere, with each wavelength probing different layers of cloud and haze particles.
A team of astronomers used the telescope data to analyse the cloud structure within areas of Jupiter where NASA's Juno spacecraft detected radio signals coming from lightning activity.
