The world's largest and most powerfull space telescope has revealed unprecedented views of jupiter the james webb telescope took the pictures of the solar system's biggest planet in july and the images show the storms moons and rings surrounding jupiter in detail that astronomers have described as incredible.
Caroline Harper, who is the head of space science at the uk space agency
well they're beautiful aren't they're not just scientifically incredibly interesting that they're fantastic to look at it's just unprecedented the the level of detail and the clarity of these images compared.
what we've had before is there a sense of surprise then carolina just how good these pictures are i think so yes i think to be honest it's fair to say some of these images have pretty much knocked the socks off
some of the scientists they're all saying james webb is performing even better than expected which is brilliant news tell us what we're seeing caroline when we see these sort of close-up detailed pictures of jupiter what's been revealed.
well so so what we're looking at is composite images taken with one of the instruments on james webb the near cam instrument and what we're looking at has been artificially colored because james webb uses infrared light to observe the universe and in this case to observe jupiter so it's been artificially colored and if you look at the images that we can see the sort of the white are areas that are reflecting a lot of light so probably the tops of high clouds so you will see the the famous red spot on jupiter which in these images looks white so there's a lot of light
jupiter is much bigger than earth and and the diameter of that storm yes it could swallow earth.
What Next?
Well so james webb was originally conceived to look far back in time at the earliest stars to see the faint light that comes from the very first stars in the universe as they were forming and you need infrared light to be able to see the light from these stars because uh the universe is expanding so as the light travels a long distance it gets stretched into longer wavelengths which sit in the infrared spectrum so you need a telescope like james webb to be able to capture that really faint infrared light from the earliest stars in the universe.
So this is really looking back much further in time than we've been able to do before to the earliest stars and the other thing about james webb is the infrared light lets it peer inside dust clouds that always surround star nurseries and baby planets forming there's always a lot of thick dust and the hubble space telescope which has been sending back amazing images for the past 30 years
It's brilliant but it uses visible light and that has its limitations it can't see through these dust clouds and james webb can that's so exciting.