Jupiter's Great Red Spot turns blue in new ultraviolet view from Hubble Telescope (photo)

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By Rahul Rao
published

The image, and the data used to make it, will help scientists quite literally peel away Jupiter’s atmosphere and look within upper layers of the planet’s interior.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveals an ultraviolet view of Jupiter. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Wong (University of California - Berkeley); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America))

Viewing Jupiter in ultraviolet light really brings out the planet's storms.

The Hubble Space Telescope recently snapped an ultraviolet image of the gas giant, offering a stunning false-color look at the planet's turbulent atmosphere. Prominent in the image is Jupiter's Great Red Spot. It is especially visible in this picture because haze particles high in Jupiter's atmosphere — which are particularly concentrated above the giant, centuries-old storm — are very good at absorbing ultraviolet light.

On the other hand, the clouds in Jupiter's polar regions are not as prominent, since the atmosphere absorbs less ultraviolet there. This may be because particles in the atmosphere there have different sizes, compositions, or altitudes than those at lower latitudes.

Related: Stunning new images of Jupiter reveal atmosphere details in different light (video)

Hubble created this image by taking images of Jupiter with three different filters, collecting data across three different sets of ultraviolet wavelengths. Humans obviously cannot see ultraviolet light, so astronomers gave each set its own color: One in blue, a second in green and a third in red.

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—  See Jupiter shine bright during the Taurid meteor shower 

The image, and the data used to make it, will help scientists quite literally peel away Jupiter's atmosphere and look within the upper layers of the planet's interior. Astronomers want to use that data to map water clouds deep in Jupiter's atmosphere, which might help understand the shapes and structures of those clouds.

Astronomers have been able to turn Hubble on Jupiter for decades. Famously, Hubble watched shrapnel from the comet Shoemaker-Levy crash into the gas giant's surface in 1994.

And NASA's other revolutionary space-based instrument, the James Webb Space Telescope, has also turned its gaze towards Jupiter recently, revealing jet streams in the planet's atmosphere and providing gorgeous views of our solar system's largest planet.

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Rahul Rao
Rahul Rao
Contributing Writer

Rahul Rao is a graduate of New York University's SHERP and a freelance science writer, regularly covering physics, space, and infrastructure. His work has appeared in Gizmodo, Popular Science, Inverse, IEEE Spectrum, and Continuum. He enjoys riding trains for fun, and he has seen every surviving episode of Doctor Who. He holds a masters degree in science writing from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and earned a bachelors degree from Vanderbilt University, where he studied English and physics.