Daily Image
29-07-2016Slicing through Jupiter's cloudy veil
| Submitter: | Richard Strom |
| Description: | Jupiter, king (and, appropriately, largest) of the planets, is only outshone in the night sky by Venus and the Moon. Optically (color image) what we see is the outermost Jovian atmosphere: cloud bands and the great red spot (an immense storm system). To unveil what happens below the cloud tops, we need "radio eyes", as provided by the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico. The new radio maps (monochrome image shows a 2-cm map) penetrate as much as 100 km through cloudy haze, to the level where clouds form. These images were recently published by Berkeley Professor Imke de Pater (Helena Kluyver Visitor to ASTRON/JIVE) and her colleagues (in "Science", Vol. 352, Issue 6290, pp. 1198-1201). Movie credits (Radio): Robert J. Sault (Univ. Melbourne), Imke de Pater and Michael H. Wong (UC Berkeley); (Optical): Marco Vedovato, Christopher Go, Manos Kardasis, Ian Sharp, Imke de Pater. |
| Copyright: | (not copyrighted) |
| Tweet |  |