NASA has released new images of Jupiter taken by the Juno spacecraft, showing the planet's turbulent clouds and cyclonic storms in its northern hemisphere from May 12, 2024.
Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, has been explored by nine spacecraft—seven flybys and two orbiters, including Juno, which has been studying the planet since 2016.
Jupiter's stormy atmosphere features more than a dozen prevailing winds, with speeds reaching up to 335 miles per hour (539 kilometers per hour) at the equator. Additionally, the Great Red Spot, a massive storm system twice the size of Earth, has been observed on Jupiter for over 300 years.
The extraordinary vivid glows shown in the new observations are known as auroras. They are created when high-energy particles enter a planet’s atmosphere near its magnetic poles and collide with gas atoms.
Jupiter, its Great Red Spot and three of its four largest satellites are visible in this photo taken Feb. 5, 1979, by Voyager 1. Io, Europa, and Callisto are seen against Jupiter disk.
According to NASA, Jupiter's zonal winds, going in opposite directions, generate eddies of all sizes that manifest in storms swirling in the atmosphere. At the highest level “pop-up clouds,” the small, bright clouds that amass at the edge of one of these fronts, are thought to be parcels of air pushed up to the altitude at which ammonia ice condenses.
Jupiter's banded appearance is created by the cloud-forming "weather layer." In this composite image, the image on the left show's Jupiter's thermal energy being emitted in infrared light, with dark cloudy bands appearing as silhouettes against Jupiter's thermal glow.
The image on the right shows Jupiter's appearance in visible light, with white cloudy "zones" and the relatively cloud-free "belts" appearing as red-brown colors, according to NASA.
