NASA announced that a new aspect of Jupiter's atmosphere has been discovered thanks to the space agency's James Webb Space Telescope.
Scientists studying images captured by the telescope in July 2022 discovered a "narrow jet stream" near the planet's equator with winds at 320 mph. The jet stream is more than 3,000 miles wide, according to the space agency.
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“This is something that totally surprised us,” Ricardo Hueso, lead author of the research paper published in Nature Astronomy, said in a statement. “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.”
The discovery allows for a better understanding of how the different layers of the planet's atmosphere work with each other. The new jet stream has sustained winds twice as powerful as a Category 5 hurricane and is located 25 miles above the clouds in the planet's lower atmosphere.
Other missions have looked at Jupiter’s atmosphere and detected the lower, deeper layers, where there are gigantic storms and ammonia ice clouds. Webb’s sensitive near-infrared eye reveals new detail in the higher-altitude layers, 15-30 mi (25-50 km) above the cloud tops. pic.twitter.com/SG0s8vI37u
— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) October 19, 2023
“It’s amazing to me that, after years of tracking Jupiter’s clouds and winds from numerous observatories, we still have more to learn about Jupiter, and features like this jet can remain hidden from view until these new NIRCam images were taken in 2022,” researcher Leigh Fletcher, from the University of Leicester, said in a statement.
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The James Webb Space Telescope was launched into space by NASA in December 2021, and the space agency has been releasing images from the telescope since July 2022, touting its advanced capabilities.
Since it was launched into space, images from the telescope have shown the scale and complexity of the cosmos. The telescope has made several breakthroughs as scientists seek to understand the formation of the universe.