The JWST image of Jupiter shows the volcanic moon Io interacting with Jupiter’s aurora — creating a small bulge in the aurora low in the planet’s sky. The image reveals “material coming from Io flowing down the magnetic field lines,” Mellin said. The effect has been seen before, but was easily recognized by JWST with just a glance at the planet.
JWST is also exploring planets in other star systems. The telescope has already glimpsed the famous TRAPPIST-1 system, a red dwarf star with seven Earth-sized worlds (some potentially habitable), although the data is still being analyzed. Early observations of a less hospitable planet, a “hot Jupiter” called WASP-96 b, in a tight 3.4-day orbit around its star have been published.
JWST detected water vapor in the planet’s atmosphere, confirming evidence of water reported days earlier by Cheema McGruder of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center and colleagues using a ground-based telescope. But JWST can go further; by observing the carbon-to-oxygen ratio of WASP-96 b, may be able to solve a perplexing mystery about hot Jupiters: how they achieve such close orbits around their stars. More oxygen suggests the gas giant originally formed far from the star, where water could condense, while a higher carbon ratio suggests it was always close.
Meanwhile, JWST may have spotted a temporary light in the sky — a short-lived event known as a transient — that it wasn’t originally designed to do. Astronomer Mike Engeser and colleagues at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland (the operations center for JWST), spotted a bright object not seen in Hubble images of the same region. They believe it is a supernova, or exploding star, about 3 billion light-years away—proof that the telescope can detect these events.
JWST should also be able to find much more distant supernovae, giving it yet another way to serve as a probe of the early universe. It can also detect stars torn apart by the supermassive black holes that lie at the centers of galaxies, something no previous telescope has seen. “For the first time, we’ll be able to peer into these very deep, dark regions,” said Ori Fox, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute who leads the team studying transients.
Transients, like other astronomical phenomena, must be redefined. After decades of planning and construction, JWST hit the sky. The problem is now keeping pace with a constant barrage of science coming from a machine so sophisticated yet foolproof that you hardly believe it was created by human brains. “It works and it’s insane,” Larson said.
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