Source : esahubble
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has made headlines for all of its accomplishments nine months after its launch. The newly launched telescope’s uniqueness can be seen by contrasting its images of Jupiter with those captured by the beloved Hubble, according to Business Insider.
It is widely believed that the Hubble Space Telescope will be replaced by the James Webb Space Telescope. To take a different camera and take pictures of space, NASA did not spend $10 billion and send a telescope a million miles from Earth. NASA has made sure that the JWST “goes beyond” what the Hubble has done so far, both literally and in terms of the wavelengths it can capture, using what they learned from the Hubble mission.
We showed you the JWST images of Jupiter and how they revealed previously unseen details last month. In that image, the brightly coloured auroras and dense clouds looked fantastic. However, in order to see the superiority of these captures, the images must be compared to those taken by Hubble.
Auroras on Jupiter
Since auroras are frequently observed near Earth’s poles and Jupiter has an atmosphere as well, it is not surprising that the largest planet in the solar system also has a similar phenomenon to boast about.
In order to see what Jupiter’s auroras looked like, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to take photographs of the planet in ultraviolet light. A near-infrared camera (NIRCam) on the JWST was used to record the auroras less than ten years later. On a planet with a magnetic field 20,000 times stronger than the Earth’s, scientists were able to discern the finer details of these lights with a little help from artificial colouring.
Spotting Jupiter’s smaller moons & faint rings
Everyone is familiar with Jupiter’s Europa, which has an icy crust and a thin atmosphere primarily consisting of oxygen. The Hubble Space Telescope sent us images of this nearly 2,000 mile (3,122 km) wide moon, but it only captured barely visible images of the smaller moons and their faint shadows. JWST, on the other hand, captured images of much smaller moons, Adrastea & Amalthea, the smallest of which is only 12 miles (19 km) across.
The JWST not only captured small moons, but also faint rings made up of dust particles that rose as a result of cosmic debris collisions on Jupiter’s moons. JWST’s ability to look beyond cosmic dust with its NIRCam also gave us images of distant galaxies beyond Jupiter that were not visible in the Hubble images. Scientists hope this ability will help them travel back in time to the light emitted by the early galaxies in the first billion years after the Big Bang.
To be fair to Hubble, the JWST’s primary mirror is six times bigger than the Hubble’s, giving it a 15x coverage & better spatial resolution.
