The discovery of this jet stream is giving insights into how the layers of Jupiter’s famously turbulent atmosphere interact with each other, and how the Webb telescope (Webb) is uniquely capable of tracking those features.Ĭomparing snapshots taken on consecutive days “What we have always seen as blurred hazes in Jupiter’s atmosphere now appear as crisp features that we can track along with the planet’s fast rotation and move much faster than the typical velocities found in Jupiter’s equator at cloud level.” “This is something that totally surprised us,” said Hueso of the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain. This means that for every kilometer above these visible clouds, the wind speed increases by 7 to 10 kilometers per hour, according to Ricardo Hueso, lead author of a paper describing the findings published today in the journal Nature Astronomy. The high-speed jet stream, which is traveling at 320 miles per hour (515 kilometers per hour) and is more than 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers) wide, sits over Jupiter’s equator, 15 to 30 miles (25 to 50 kilometers) above the main cloud deck familiar from optical photos.īased on observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, winds in the visible cloud layer blow at about 180 mph (250 km/hour). NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has discovered a fast-moving jet stream in Jupiter’s atmosphere that is blowing twice as fast as the visible cloud layers below it, creating wind shears that far exceed anything seen on Earth.
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