Jupiter is famous for its distinctive red and white bands — swirling clouds of moving gas that astronomers traditionally use to track winds in Jupiter’s lower atmosphere. Astronomers have also seen, near its poles, the vivid glowing known as aurorae, which appear to be associated with strong winds in the planet’s upper atmosphere. But until ...
Data from NASA spacecraft Juno‘s journey to Jupiter suggests that Mars may be shedding dust into interplanetary space. Look up to the night sky just before dawn, or after dusk, and you might see a faint column of light extending up from the horizon. That luminous glow is the zodiacal light, or sunlight reflected toward ...
On Feb. 22, 1906, German astrophotographer Max Wolf helped reshape our understanding of the solar system by discovering Trojan asteroids. Again. Born in 1863, Wolf had a habit of dramatically altering the astronomy landscape. Something of a prodigy, he discovered his first comet at only 21 years old. Then, in 1890, he boldly declared that ...
After traveling several billion miles toward the Sun, a wayward young comet-like object orbiting among the giant planets has found a temporary parking place along the way. The object has settled near a family of captured ancient asteroids, called Trojans, that are orbiting the Sun alongside Jupiter. This is the first time a comet-like object ...
On Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, powerful eruptions may spew into space, raising questions among hopeful astrobiologists on Earth: What would blast out from miles-high plumes? Could they contain signs of extraterrestrial life? And where in Europa would they originate? A new explanation now points to a source closer to the frozen surface than might be ...
This latest image of Jupiter’s storms, taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope on Aug. 25, 2020, was captured when the planet was 406 million miles from Earth. Hubble’s sharp view is giving researchers an updated weather report on the monster planet’s turbulent atmosphere, including a remarkable new storm brewing, and a cousin of the famous ...
Jupiter, named for the king of the ancient Roman gods, commands its own mini-version of our solar system of circling satellites; their movements convinced Galileo Galilei that Earth is not the center of the universe in the early 17th century. More than 400 years later, astronomers will use NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to observe these ...
Though it looks like it to us, clouds on Jupiter do not form a flat surface. Some of Jupiter’s clouds rise up above the surrounding cloud tops. The two bright spots in the right-center of this image are much higher than the surrounding clouds. Jupiter’s clouds extend deep into the planet Jupiter’s atmosphere is a ...
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