NASA has secretly leaked two surprising new photos of our own solar system.
The new pictures were taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s new flagship instrument that could allow us to peer back into the beginning of the universe and could help locate extraterrestrial life.
This week, NASA revealed the first images sent back from this telescope. The images show huge rocks and nebulae, with NASA highlighting how the telescope has allowed it to see stars and dust never seen before.
But at the same time, a team appears to have revealed the first images the telescope has taken of objects in our own solar system.
While not as spectacular as the first published images, they could be just as important to scientists who want to use the telescope to better understand distant worlds.
The two images show Jupiter and were taken by the Near Infrared Camera, or NIRCam, equipment on the James Webb Space Telescope. Scientists say they demonstrate that it is capable of photographing details such as the moons and rings of planets like Jupiter – and there are believed to be many of them scattered throughout the universe.
“Observing a bright planet and its satellites and rings was expected to be challenging due to stray light that could affect the science instrument used, but also the fine-pointing sensor must track guide stars close to the bright planet,” the authors wrote. But tests have shown that challenges are possible.
It also suggests the telescope will be useful for work in our own solar system, such as tracking near-Earth objects and comets as they fly through our cosmic neighbor. Engineers took pictures of nine different targets to test this ability, and Jupiter was the slowest moving of them all.
(NASA)
The images have not been officially released, but are instead included in a NASA paper that describes how well the telescope has worked for scientists so far. The paper concludes that the telescope has exceeded the already high expectations researchers had for it.
The telescope is entering its first cycle, “having demonstrated that the observatory exceeded its demanding pre-launch performance expectations,” the authors wrote. “With groundbreaking capabilities, JWST has ushered in the first scientific discovery in many years.”
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