The world’s newest and largest space telescope has released photos showing unprecedented views of Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. Scientists on Monday released footage captured by the James Webb Space Telescope in July showing Jupiter’s northern and southern lights and swirling polar fog. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a storm large enough to engulf Earth, stands out starkly next to countless smaller storms. A wide-field image is particularly dramatic, showing the faint rings around the planet, as well as two tiny moons against a sparkling background of galaxies. “We have never seen Jupiter like this. It’s all incredible,” said planetary astronomer Imke de Pater, of the University of California, Berkeley, who helped lead the observations. “We didn’t really expect it to be this good, to be honest,” he added in a statement. The infrared images were artificially colored in blue, white, green, yellow and orange, according to the American-French research team, to distinguish the features. The $10 billion successor to NASA and the European Space Agency’s Hubble Space Telescope launched late last year and has been observing the world in infrared since the summer. Scientists hope to see the dawn of the universe with Webb, looking back to the time when the first stars and galaxies formed 13.7 billion years ago. The observatory is located one million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth.
