Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have discovered a high-speed jet stream traveling over Jupiter’s equator above the main cloud decks. The jet is traveling 320 miles per hour (515 kilometers per hour). It is located around 25 miles (40 kilometers) in altitude, in Jupiter’s lower stratosphere, just above the tropospheric hazes next to the boundary between the layers.
Jupiter has a layered atmosphere, and this illustration displays how Webb is uniquely capable of collecting information from higher layers of the altitude than before. Scientists were able to use Webb to identify wind speeds at different layers of Jupiter’s atmosphere in order to isolate the high-speed jet. The observations of Jupiter were taken 10 hours apart, or one Jupiter day, in three different filters, noted here, each uniquely able to detect changes in small features at different altitudes of Jupiter’s atmosphere.
Credits
Image
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Ricardo Hueso (UPV), Imke de Pater (UC Berkeley), Thierry Fouchet (Observatory of Paris), Leigh Fletcher (University of Leicester), Michael H. Wong (UC Berkeley)
Illustration
Andi James (STScI)
