jupiter
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You’ve Never Seen Jupiter Look So Much Like Cotton Candy
You probably know Jupiter, the rotund fifth planet from the Sun, as orange and tan with a big red splotch. But the Hubble Space Telescope recently imaged the gas giant in ultraviolet light, giving the world a very different look. At UV wavelengths, Jupiter’s clouds appear in bright pinks, blues, and purple hues. The image is…
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Webb Telescope Reveals a High-Speed Jet on Jupiter
In July 2022, the Webb Space Telescope detected an intense jet shooting across the equator of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. The jet is travelling at about 320 miles per hour (515 kilometres per hour) and is about 25 miles (40 km) in altitude, corresponding to Jupiter’s lower stratosphere. Astronomers knew east-west…
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Quasi-Planets Called JuMBOs Are Bopping Around in Space
A team of astronomers have detected over 500 planet-like objects in the inner Orion Nebula and the Trapezium Cluster that they believe could shake up the very definition of a planet. The 4-light-year-wide Trapezium Cluster sits at the heart of the Orion Nebula, or Messier 42, about 1,400 light-years from Earth. The cluster is filled…
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Ouch! Jupiter Just Got Smacked By an Unidentified Celestial Object
As the largest planet in our solar system, Jupiter is not one to play with. That doesn’t stop wandering comets or asteroids from testing the gas giant, occasionally crashing into Jupiter due to its enormous size and immense gravitational pull. An amateur astronomer caught a brief impact on Jupiter this week, appearing as a bright…