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Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Let's take a little trip, shall we? Last week NASA released stunning new images of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. Taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, they're like nothing we've seen before. In spectacularly high resolution, the photos bring the gas giant and its Great Red Spot to life with wisps of gas, twinkling auroras, and singular clarity. Here to take us into space is Munazza Alam, astronomer, a National Geographic young explorer, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Carnegie Earth and Planets Laboratory in Washington, DC. Welcome to The Takeaway, Munazza.
Munazza Alam: Thank you so much for having me.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Tell me about these images of Jupiter. What do they look like and what stands out for you?
Munazza Alam: These images of Jupiter are so stunning, and so much jumps out at me just looking at it. First off, as you mentioned, we see these bright regions around the north and south pole of Jupiter, and those are due to the auroras that occur in the atmosphere of Jupiter. Auroras are just like the northern and southern lights that occur here on Earth. They are just due to interactions of solar energy and particles with the magnetic field of the planet, in this case Jupiter, and on our planet; the magnetic field of Earth.
Melissa Harris-Perry: The colors that I'm seeing, are these the genuine colors? Are they superimposed? Help me to understand the colors in these images.
Munazza Alam: This image of Jupiter looks a little different than the typical image or picture of Jupiter that we have in our heads, which is more orangey-reddish. That's because this image was taken with the James Webb Space Telescope, JWST, which observes at infrared wavelengths or colors of white, which are a bit cooler, so they've observed fainter light. Actually, the image that we're looking at is those wavelengths mapped to visible wavelengths that the human eye can see.
The other really interesting thing about the colors here is they actually correspond to how high up in the atmosphere of Jupiter that we're looking at. These images is more white, kind of light blue, kind of yellowish greenish, and actually gives us some information about the atmosphere of Jupiter. For example, we are familiar with this Great Red Spot that humans have been observing for centuries when they've pointed a telescope up at Jupiter, but this Great Red Spot actually looks pretty bright, like white light, in this JWST image. That's because it's high up in the atmosphere of Jupiter and it's reflecting a lot of sunlight.
We also see the reflected light elsewhere on the planet also shows up as white. We also see that around the north and south pole of Jupiter, we have these fuzzy regions that are a bit yellowish and greenish, and that's due to hazes in the atmosphere of Jupiter. Then we also see that there are some areas that look a little bit blue, and those are due to clouds that are a bit deeper in the atmosphere.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, what are the hot Jupiters?
Munazza Alam: Hot Jupiters are exoplanets. They're planets outside of the Solar System that are similar in composition, so similar in terms of their make-ups - they're made of gas - but that are very, very close in to their host stars. So close in, in fact, that a year on these planets could be a day or two days or three days. Much, much closer in than Mercury.
Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. Let's go back to the red. Now we're going to see it as a white spot. Help us to understand what that is and what we now know about it from these images that we didn't previously understand.
Munazza Alam: The Great Red Spot, which now actually appears white in these new images from JWST, is a storm that is occurring on Jupiter that is actually bigger than our own planet Earth.
Melissa Harris-Perry: The storm is bigger than all of Earth?
Munazza Alam: Yes. We see it as light because it's reflecting a lot of sunlight actually in this image. It's pretty high up in the atmosphere of Jupiter, and so that's why we're seeing it also as reflecting a lot of light.
Melissa Harris-Perry: When you talk about the spot already, just that one part of that planet being larger than our entire planet, there's certainly this sense of awe, extraordinary sense of insignificance in the universe that emerges from that. Help me to understand why these images-- why our understanding of Jupiter matters. This place so far from us.
Munazza Alam: Jupiter is far from us, but it's also closer when we think about these hot Jupiters that are outside of the Solar System. There's still so much that we don't know about our own backyard. Looking at this image of Jupiter, we can really resolve in detail and look at the atmosphere of Jupiter and see more about what's going on in terms of how the atmosphere is moving and changing, and all of the chemistry and physics that's happening there. We can resolve the faint rings of Jupiter, which are a million times fainter than the planet itself. We can also see two of Jupiter's moons in this image.
I think just looking at this JWST image of Jupiter, it really encapsulates everything that we are interested in learning more about with Jupiter. We're interested in learning more about its atmosphere and the complex physics and chemistry that are happening on it, we're interested in learning more about its ring system, and we're interested in learning more about the moons that are in orbit around it.
Melissa Harris-Perry: I know that you do work with spectrographs. Can you tell us about those?
Munazza Alam: Yes. Before we talk about spectrographs, I just want to take a step back and talk about what telescopes actually are. In essence, a telescope is just a light bucket. It is a bucket that collects particles of light called photons. Now, in order for us to understand the light that telescopes collect, we attach instruments to those telescopes. Some instruments are imagers, which are essentially like cameras that take pictures. Like that picture or that image of Jupiter that we're just talking about.
Other instruments are called spectrographs. When they're attached to telescopes what they do is they disperse or spread out the light that the telescope collects, and they spread out the light into its colors or wavelengths. When we spread out light into its different colors, we start to see different bumps and wiggles in what's called the spectrum of the light. Those bumps and wiggles correspond to fingerprints of absorption or emission from atoms and molecules that are present in that light.
For example, if we are observing the atmosphere of a planet and we take a spectrum of that atmosphere, when we look at the spectrum and we see all those bumps and wiggles, those bumps and wiggles tell us what atoms and molecules are present in the planet's atmosphere. We can use spectra in order to figure out what a planet's atmosphere is made of.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Munazza Alam, astronomer, National Geographic young explorer, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Carnegie Earth and Planets Laboratory. Thank you so much for taking us a bit out of this world.
Munazza Alam: Thanks for having me.
Melissa Harris-Perry: I just want to give a quick follow-up here because space will indeed be the final frontier for Nichelle Nichols, the legendary actor who played Star Trek's Lieutenant Uhura, and later worked with NASA to help recruit women and people of color for the agency. We learned last month of her passing, and late last week it was announced that her ashes and a sample of her DNA will be launched into space later this year. A fitting final resting place for the great Nichelle Nichols.
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