A team of scientists have been left baffled after the James Webb telescope spotted some ‘mysterious’ activity over 365 million miles away on Jupiter.
The new observations of Jupiter’s poles appear to show unexpected activity occurring that the experts have been working to unpick.
According to NASA, the James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory, ‘solving mysteries’ in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it.
This is after the telescope showed that shimmering lights at the poles don’t actually glow steadily but instead flash and flare up.
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The telescope was used to record the lights on Jupiter along with using a near-infrared camera, which took rapid shots of the planet.
Coordinating with photos taken on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, the experts compared the infrared and ultraviolet activity on the gas giant.
Jonathan Nichols, who led a research team at the University of Leicester, said: “What made these observations even more special is that we also took pictures simultaneously in the ultraviolet with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.”
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After discovering that the images taken didn’t always match, Nichols added: “This has left us scratching our heads. In order to cause the combination of brightness seen by both Webb and Hubble, we need to have an apparently impossible combination of high quantities of very low energy particles hitting the atmosphere – like a tempest of drizzle! We still don’t understand how this happens.”
This revelation could change everything we think we know about Jupiter’s auroras, which were once thought to ebb and flow over the course of a few minutes.
However, information gathered from the James Webb telescope suggests that these changes might actually occur in a matter of seconds.
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Nichols continued: “What a Christmas present it was – it just blew me away. We wanted to see how quickly the auroras change, expecting it to fade in and out ponderously, perhaps over a quarter of an hour or so.
“Instead, we observed the whole auroral region fizzing and popping with light, sometimes varying by the second.”
It has shed new light on planetary weather and the team now intends to conduct a further study into this discrepancy between the Hubble and Webb data and to explore what the wider implications are for Jupiter’s atmosphere and space environment.