APOD: Jupiter in Infrared from Gemini (2020 May 13)

[APOD Robot]

Jupiter in Infrared from Gemini

Explanation: In infrared, Jupiter lights up the night. Recently, astronomers at the Gemini North Observatory in Hawaii, USA, created some of the best infrared photos of Jupiter ever taken from Earth’s surface, pictured. Gemini was able to produce such a clear image using a technique called lucky imaging, by taking many images and combining only the clearest ones that, by chance, were taken when Earth's atmosphere<?=/a> was the <a href="https://koit.com/wp-content/uploads/sit ... .jpg">most calm. Jupiter’s jack-o’-lantern-like appearance is caused by the planet’s different layers of clouds. Infrared light can pass through clouds better than visible light, allowing us to see deeper, hotter layers of Jupiter's atmosphere, while the thickest clouds appear dark. These pictures, together with ones from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Juno spacecraft, can tell us a lot about weather patterns on Jupiter, like where its massive, planet-sized storms form.

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[Ann]

Jupiter's cloudtops in visible light. Photo: ESA/Hubble.

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Jupiter's cloudtops in infrared ligth. Photo: Gemini.

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Idealized illustration of Jupiter's cloud bands, labeled with their official abbreviations. Lighter zones are indicated to the right, darker belts to the left. The Great Red Spot and Oval BA are shown in the South Tropical Zone and South Temperate Belt, respectively. Illustration: Sakurambo at English Wikipedia.

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Looks like the white zones of Jupiter are more opaque in infrared than the dark belts.

Ann

[Tilt]

A nice one to file away for October 31st.

[orin stepanek]

Looks like light coming from within the planet!

[neufer]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

<<In 2007 astronomers at Caltech and the University of Cambridge announced the first results from a new hybrid lucky imaging and adaptive optics (AO) system. The new camera gave the first diffraction-limited resolutions on 5 m-class telescopes in visible light. The research was performed on the Mt. Palomar Hale telescope of 200-inch-diameter aperture. The telescope, with lucky cam and adaptive optics, pushed it near its theoretical angular resolution, achieving up to 0.025 arc seconds for certain types of viewing. Compared to space telescopes like the 2.4 m Hubble, the system still has some drawbacks including a narrow field of view for crisp images (typically 10" to 20"), airglow, and electromagnetic frequencies blocked by the atmosphere.

When combined with an AO system, lucky imaging selects the periods when the turbulence the adaptive optics system must correct is reduced. In these periods, lasting a small fraction of a second, the correction given by the AO system is sufficient to give excellent resolution with visible light. The lucky imaging system averages the images taken during the excellent periods to produce a final image with much higher resolution than is possible with a conventional long-exposure AO camera.

This technique is applicable to getting very high resolution images of only relatively small astronomical objects, up to 10 arcseconds in diameter, as it is limited by the precision of the atmospheric turbulence correction. It also requires a relatively bright 14th-magnitude star in the field of view on which to guide. Being above the atmosphere, the Hubble Space Telescope is not limited by these concerns and so is capable of much wider-field high-resolution imaging.>>

[Chris Peterson]

JupiterIR_Gemini_960.jpg


Looks like light coming from within the planet! 8-)

It is. 4.7 micrometers is thermal radiation- the Sun emits very little energy at that wavelength. I think what we're seeing is coming from the planet itself.

[johnnydeep]

Amazing that such a clear image was taken from the earth. Also, I guess the great red spot was not in view for this picture (else I would think it would show up as a round feature of some sort)?

[sillyworm 2]

What a tease. Our Solar System is so incredibly exotic! Imagine all the wonderous worlds lurking out there.No Fair!!!!!!

[neufer]

Jupiter 4.7 µm Shortwave Window

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4.7 micrometers is thermal radiation- the Sun emits very little energy at that wavelength. I think what we're seeing is coming from the planet itself.

The infrared "Shortwave Window"

• ~4.7 µm for Jupiter
  & 3.9 µm for the Earth.

cuts through small aerosols and is about 80:20 thermal & reflected sunlight.

The darkest "Shortwave Window" regions generally indicate water ice that is both cold & absorbs sunlight.

[bystander]

viewtopic.php?t=40551

[John Zelada]

What are Jupiter's gases made of? is it purely gaseous or is there a solid surface?

[kybarand]

For discussion about Comet Halley vs Comet SWAN see viewtopic.php?f=9&t=40563.

[Ann]

What are Jupiter's gases made of? is it purely gaseous or is there a solid surface?

Jupiter definitely doesn't have a solid surface. What you see is all gaseous.

Jupiter may not even have a solid core:

Wikipedia wrote:

Jupiter was expected to either consist of a dense core, a surrounding layer of liquid metallic hydrogen (with some helium) extending outward to about 78% of the radius of the planet, and an outer atmosphere consisting predominantly of molecular hydrogen, or perhaps to have no core at all, consisting instead of denser and denser fluid (predominantly molecular and metallic hydrogen) all the way to the center, depending on whether the planet accreted first as a solid body or collapsed directly from the gaseous protoplanetary disk.

However, the Juno mission, which arrived in July 2016, found that Jupiter has a very diffuse core, mixed into the mantle. A possible cause is an impact from a planet of about ten Earth masses a few million years after Jupiter's formation, which would have disrupted an originally solid Jovian core.

Ann

[Boomer12k]

Nice....

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[DL MARTIN]

Why did the discussion for May 13 appear?

[bystander]

Why did the discussion for May 13 appear?

The Discuss link is wrong. It should be this.