James Webb Space Telescope: Fascinating Infrared Images of Jupiter

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A "citizen scientist" has created two impressive images of Jupiter from the data already available from the James Webb Space Telescope. They not only show the characteristic Great Red Spot, but also aurorae shining high above the poles.

The second image shows the luminous gas planet, its rings and several moons. "We didn't expect the images to be this good, to be honest," says astronomer Imke de Pater about the images.

Judy Schmidt, who has been processing and editing images from NASA instruments for years, collaborated with scientist Ricardo Hueso from the University of the Basque Country for the Jupiter photos now published. Jupiter is a particularly difficult subject for the James Webb space telescope because it is comparatively bright and also moves faster in the sky than the other, much more distant research targets.

Making non-visible images visible

As the US space agency explains in a blog entry, the images were taken with the NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) on the new space telescope. They show the planet in the near-infrared spectrum, which is invisible to the human eye. To prepare them for us, the expert has converted the recordings together with researchers.

Generally, longer wavelengths are translated into red colours, shorter ones into blue. Schmidt explains that in her work she tries to get images that "look natural", even if they don't even begin to show anything we could see with our eyes. Sometimes she is busy for hours.

The data collected by the space telescope does not arrive on Earth "nicely" packaged as a photo, NASA writes further. Instead, there is information about how bright the light was that reached the individual sensors. The data is then calibrated and archived for further research. Scientists can then translate this data, among other things for the regular press releases in which particularly impressive images are presented. But citizen scientists like Schmidt can also download the data and process it themselves. Currently, they are also directly available so that everyone can quickly learn how to use the new instruments as good as possible.

In the images now processed by Schmidt, the brightness corresponds to the height in Jupiter's atmosphere, explains Heidi Hammel from the space telescope team. Bright spots and streaks are likely to be particularly high clouds and storms, while dark spots are comparatively low in clouds. The Great Red Spot is particularly bright here because it reaches very high and reflects a lot of sunlight.

In the image with the moons, the rings are visible, although they are about a million times less luminous than Jupiter. Even small galaxies would be visible in the background, which again underlines that the new space telescope cannot take pictures without star clusters really popping up.

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Fascinating images

The James Webb Space Telescope is operated by the space agencies NASA, ESA and CSA and was launched on 25 December 2021. After deploying itself in a complex procedure, it arrived at the Lagrange point L2 a month later. Here it faces away from the Sun, Earth and Moon into space, so that their thermal radiation does not interfere with the infrared telescope. A huge protective screen blocks them - with a light protection factor of one million. Since it began scientific work at the beginning of July, the quality of the data has fascinated not only the research community. Last week, researchers published the most impressive and largest image ever taken.

(mho)