Hidden in the JWST image of Jupiter is the volcanic moon Io interacting with Jupiter’s aurora, creating a small bump in the planet’s low-sky aurora. The image reveals “material from Io flowing along the magnetic field lines,” Melin said. The effect has been seen before, but JWST picked it out easily with barely a glance at the planet.
JWST is also investigating planets in other star systems. The telescope has already caught a glimpse of the famous TRAPPIST-1 system, a red dwarf star with seven Earth-sized worlds (some potentially habitable), although the data is still being analyzed. The first 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 found water vapor in the planet’s atmosphere, confirming evidence of water reported days earlier by Chima McGruder of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center and colleagues, who used a ground-based telescope. But JWST can go further; by looking at 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 would suggest that the gas giant initially formed far from the star where water could condense, while a higher proportion of carbon would suggest that it has always been nearby.
Meanwhile, JWST may have detected a temporary light in the sky, a short-lived event known as a transient, which it wasn’t originally designed to do. Astronomer Mike Engesser and colleagues at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland (JWST’s operations center) observed a bright object that was not seen in Hubble images of the same region They believe it’s a supernova, or exploding star, about 3 billion light-years away, proof that the telescope can find such events.
JWST should also be able to find much more distant supernovae, giving it another way to serve as a probe of the early universe. It can also find stars torn apart by the supermassive black holes that reside at the centers of galaxies, something no previous telescope has seen. “For the first time we will be able to look at these dark, deep regions,” said Ori Fox, the Space Telescope Science Institute astronomer who leads the team studying the transients.
Transients, like other astronomical phenomena, must be redefined. After decades of planning and construction, JWST has taken to the skies. The problem now is keeping up with the constant barrage of science coming from a machine so complex yet flawless that it almost defies belief that it was built by human brains. “It works and it’s crazy,” Larson said.
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