06/06/2026
Webb was not designed to photograph planets in our own solar system. Its primary mission is deep space, galaxies billions of light-years away, the earliest light in the universe. Jupiter sits practically next door. So when scientists pointed it at Jupiter anyway, the results genuinely surprised them.
The glowing blue haze surrounding the planet is an aurora, Jupiter's northern and southern auroral rings, captured in infrared light and mapped to blue in this colour-processed image. These auroras are hundreds of times more energetic than anything Earth produces. They are driven not just by solar wind but by Jupiter's own volcanic moon Io, which constantly spews sulphur dioxide into space. Some of that material gets caught in Jupiter's enormous magnetic field and slams into the upper atmosphere at both poles, producing permanent auroral rings that dwarf our entire planet.
The white oval near Jupiter's equator on the right side of the image is a storm. Not a small one. It is large enough to contain Earth inside it with room to spare. Jupiter has dozens of these long-lived oval storms at various latitudes, all rotating independently, some persisting for decades.
The thin dark lines crossing the planet horizontally are the edges of Jupiter's ring system. Jupiter has rings. Most people do not know this because they are made of dark dust rather than the bright ice of Saturn's rings, making them nearly invisible in optical light. Webb's infrared cameras picked them up clearly.
The small bright dots to Jupiter's left are two of its moons, Amalthea and Thebe, both small inner moons that were discovered much later than Jupiter's four large Galilean moons.
Jupiter is so large that it could contain all other planets in the solar system simultaneously, with volume to spare. It has 95 known moons. It generates more heat than it receives from the Sun.
Webb looked at our own solar system's giant as a calibration exercise. What it returned looked like nothing anyone had seen before.