Swirling clouds define a huge storm in Jupiter’s northern hemisphere, captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft on 7 February during the probe’s 11th close flyby of the giant planet. When the photo was taken, Juno was 12,195 kilometres (7,578 miles) from Jupiter’s cloud tops at 49.2 degrees north latitude.
Citizen scientist Matt Brealey processed the raw image from Juno with colour adjustment by Gustavo B C. Raw images from the JunoCam imager are available for public processing.
Jupiter, the solar system’s largest planet, is now visible low in the southeast three hours after darkness falls in the UK. Now’s the time to dust off your telescope, check its optical alignment and hone your Jovian observing skills – particularly since a series of double shadow transits of the planet’s large Galilean moons starts on 24 March 2018.
The existence of a fifth giant gas planet at the time of the solar system’s formation — in addition to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune that we know of today — was first proposed in 2011. Now astrophysicists at the University of Toronto have found that a close encounter with Jupiter about four billion years ago may have resulted in the fifth giant planet’s ejection from the solar system altogether.
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