天文學(xué)家創(chuàng)造了一個前所未有的紅外木星肖像

天文學(xué)家創(chuàng)造了一個前所未有的紅外木星肖像

Ever since we first spied Jupiter in the night sky some 400 years ago, we haven't been able to take our eyes off it. And it's not only because the gas giant happens to be the biggest planet in our solar system. Jupiter is also the biggest personality in our galactic neighborhood.

自從400年前我們第一次在夜空中發(fā)現(xiàn)木星以來，我們就一直無法將目光從它身上移開。這不僅僅是因?yàn)檫@顆氣態(tài)巨星恰好是太陽系中最大的行星。木星也是我們銀河系附近最大的人格。

Photo: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA M.H. Wong (UC Berkeley) and team Acknowledgments: Mahdi Zamani

Its atmosphere is roiling with superstorms, many of them having raged for hundreds of years. And those storms feature 40-mile high thunderheads that spit lightning bolts at least three times as powerful as anything we've known on Earth.

它的大氣層被超級風(fēng)暴攪動著，其中許多風(fēng)暴已經(jīng)肆虐了數(shù)百年。這些風(fēng)暴以40英里高的雷雨云為特征，這些雷雨云產(chǎn)生的閃電強(qiáng)度至少是我們在地球上所知道的任何東西的三倍。

And then there's that Great Red Spot, a megastorm that's twice as wide as our entire planet. Now, thanks to a collaboration between the Hubble Space Telescope, the Gemini Observatory, and the Juno spacecraft, we can peer beneath that to see how deep Jupiter's flair for drama really runs.

然后是那個大紅斑，一個超級巨星，它的寬度是我們整個星球的兩倍?，F(xiàn)在，多虧了哈勃太空望遠(yuǎn)鏡、雙子座天文臺和朱諾號宇宙飛船的合作，我們可以看到木星的戲劇性究竟有多深。

"We want to know how Jupiter's atmosphere works," Michael Wong, an astronomer at University of California, Berkeley who worked on the project, says in a press release.

“我們想知道木星的大氣層是如何工作的，”參與該項(xiàng)目的加州大學(xué)伯克利分校天文學(xué)家邁克爾·王(Michael Wong)在一份新聞稿中說。

To do that, researchers stitched together multi-wavelength observations from Hubble and Gemini with close-up views from Juno's orbit. Their findings, published this week in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, explores the origins of lightning outbursts and cyclonic vortices.

為了做到這一點(diǎn)，研究人員將哈勃和雙子座的多波長觀測結(jié)果與朱諾軌道的近距離觀測結(jié)果結(jié)合起來。他們的發(fā)現(xiàn)發(fā)表在本周的《天體物理學(xué)雜志增刊》上，探索了閃電爆發(fā)和氣旋渦旋的起源。

Along the way, the overlapping observations from Gemini, Hubble, and Juno paint the entire planet in infrared, giving us the most detailed portrait yet of this ultimate drama queen — and specifically, the megastorm that is the Great Red Spot.

在這個過程中，雙子座、哈勃和朱諾的重疊觀測用紅外線描繪了整個行星，給我們提供了這個終極戲劇女王的最詳細(xì)的肖像——特別是大紅斑的超級巨星。

It turns out that the smoldering spot is riddled with holes. The infrared map, researchers note, reveals the dark patches in the Red Spot aren't different types of clouds, but rather gaps in cloud cover.

原來那個悶燃的地方布滿了洞。研究人員指出，紅外地圖揭示了紅點(diǎn)上的暗斑并不是不同類型的云，而是云層的縫隙。

"It's kind of like a jack-o'-lantern," Wong notes in the release. "You see bright infrared light coming from cloud-free areas, but where there are clouds, it's really dark in the infrared."

“這有點(diǎn)像南瓜燈，”黃在新聞稿中寫道。“你可以看到來自無云地區(qū)的明亮的紅外光，但有云的地方，紅外線就會變暗。”

With the help of the Hubble and Gemini telescopes, as well as the Juno spacecraft, scientists say they can now plumb the depths of Jupiter's angry atmosphere — and how it formed.

在哈勃望遠(yuǎn)鏡、雙子座望遠(yuǎn)鏡和朱諾號宇宙飛船的幫助下，科學(xué)家們說他們現(xiàn)在可以探測木星憤怒的大氣層的深度——以及它是如何形成的。

"Because we now routinely have these high-resolution views from a couple of different observatories and wavelengths, we are learning so much more about Jupiter's weather," NASA planetary scientist Amy Simon explains in the release. "This is our equivalent of a weather satellite. We can finally start looking at weather cycles."

NASA行星科學(xué)家艾米·西蒙在新聞稿中解釋道:“因?yàn)槲覀儸F(xiàn)在可以通過幾個不同的天文臺和不同的波長獲得這些高分辨率的圖像，所以我們對木星的天氣了解得更多了。這相當(dāng)于我們的氣象衛(wèi)星。我們終于可以開始研究天氣周期了。”