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Astronomers have actually long believed that the upper clouds of Jupiter, which produce the world’s renowned pale brown belts, are made from frozen ammonia. A brand-new research study has actually revealed that these clouds are really situated lower in the environment than we believed and are made of ammonium hydrosulfide blended with smog.
Hubble’s picture of Jupiter shows the ever-changing landscape of its unstable environment. Image credit: NASA/ ESA/ Hubble/ Amy Simon, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/ Michael H. Wong, University of California, Berkeley/ Joseph DePasquale, STScI.
Resident researcher Steve Hill formerly revealed that he might map the world’s environment by utilizing just specifically colored filters and his yard telescope.
These outcomes supplied preliminary ideas that the clouds were unfathomable within Jupiter’s warm environment to be constant with clouds made from ammonia ice.
To examine, Hill and a group of expert astronomers from the University of Oxford, the University of Leicester and British Astronomical Association utilized the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to study the environment of gas giants.
“MUSE can scanning the environment of Jupiter at various wavelengths, drawing up the various particles that comprise the world’s environment,” they stated.
Their research study reveals that the brand-new method with yard telescopes or VLT/MUSE can map the abundance of ammonia in Jupiter’s environment with unexpected precision.
When it comes to clouds, they concluded that Jupiter’s environment is similar to a layered cake.
Clouds of ammonium hydrosulfide cover the upper layers, however often there might be a design of ammonia ice clouds, gave the top by strong vertical convection.
The whole cake’s structure, however, is not yet completely understood, and the work of resident researchers will be crucial to discovering it.
Next time you are looking at Jupiter or Saturn from your yard, you might likewise be deciphering the tricks still lying within our Solar System.
“We evaluate the dependability of the filter-imaging strategy by using it to VLT/MUSE observations of Jupiter and reveal that the approach yields remarkably trusted outcomes that concur carefully with more advanced analyses of these observations, and which are likewise constant with observations made at microwave wavelengths by NASA’s Juno spacecraft and the Very Large Array,” the astronomers stated.
“We reveal that the primary level of reflection at red wavelengths is from the 2-3 bar level, which is well underneath the anticipated ammonia ice cloud condensation level at 0.7 bar, and conclude that ammonia ice can not be the primary cloud constituent.”
“We likewise reveal that the very same method can be used to MUSE observations of Saturn and discover that ammonia maps drawn out concur effectively with the ammonia abundance identified by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope at pressures higher than 2 bar.”
The findings appear in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets
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Patrick G.J. Irwin et al2025. Clouds and Ammonia in the Atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn Determined From a Band-Depth Analysis of VLT/MUSE Observations. JGR Planets 130 (1 ): e2024JE008622; doi: 10.1029/ 2024JE008622
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