Jupiter does not seem like the kind of place you want to visit. With its scary Big Red Dot, double-strength gravity, horrifically dense, dry atmosphere and the fact that it apparently eats other planets, you’d be forgiven for wanting to stay as far away from Jupiter as possible.
For those of us happy to keep our distance from the King of Planets, now, excitingly, we’ve a better idea of what Jupiter looks like than ever before. Just yesterday Nasa released new images from the James Webb Telescope that show the planet in all its glory. And, putting it lightly, they’re really freaking spectacular – here are a couple of the shots, plus another of a ‘cartwheel galaxy’.
The images are so good that they apparently took Nasa’s own scientists by surprise. The snaps reveal Jupiter as a planet dappled with white spots and streaks, while also showing glowing aurora at its poles. The shots are much more vivid than those of the Hubble telescope, which the Webb is a direct successor to.
The Webb mission started last December as a joint project between Nasa, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. The Webb is the world’s largest and most powerful space telescope. Currently, the James Webb Space Telescope is orbiting the sun about 930,000 miles from Earth – and its mission is expected to last a decade, meaning that many more exciting pics of our solar system could well be on the way.
You can find out more about the Webb’s mission and see more pics here.
Did you see our guide to the most spectacular astronomical events of 2022?