James Webb telescope reveals 'impossible' auroras on Jupiter that have astronomers scratching their heads
On Christmas Day in 2023, scientists trained the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on Jupiter's auroras and captured a dazzling light show.
The researchers observed rapidly-changing features in Jupiter's vast auroras using JWST's infrared cameras. The findings could help explain how Jupiter's atmosphere is heated and cooled, according to a study published May 12 in Nature Communications .
'What a Christmas present it was — it just blew me away!' study coauthor Jonathan Nichols , a researcher studying auroras at the University of Leicester in the UK, said in a statement . 'We wanted to see how quickly the auroras change, expecting them to fade in and out ponderously, perhaps over a quarter of an hour or so. Instead, we observed the whole auroral region fizzing and popping with light, sometimes varying by the second.'
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Auroras form when high-energy charged particles, often released from the sun, slam into gases in a planet's atmosphere, causing the gas to glow. Jupiter's strong magnetic field scoops up charged particles such as electrons from the solar wind — and from eruptions on its highly volcanic moon Io — and sends them hurtling toward the planet's poles, where they put on a spectacle hundreds of times brighter than Earth's Northern Lights .
Related: NASA reveals 'glass-smooth lake of cooling lava' on surface of Jupiter's moon Io
In the new study, the team looked closely at infrared light emitted by the trihydrogen cation, H 3 +. This molecule forms in Jupiter's auroras when energetic electrons meet hydrogen in the planet's atmosphere. Its infrared emission sends heat out of Jupiter's atmosphere, but the molecule can also be destroyed by fast-moving electrons. To date, no ground-based telescopes have been sensitive enough to determine exactly how long H 3 + sticks around.
But by using JWST's Near Infrared Camera, the team observed H 3 + emissions that varied more than they expected. They found that H 3 + lasts about two and a half minutes in Jupiter's atmosphere before being destroyed. That could help scientists tease out how much of an effect H 3 + has on cooling Jupiter's atmosphere.
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But the scientists don't have the full picture yet. They also found some puzzling data when they turned the Hubble Space Telescope toward Jupiter at the same time. Hubble captured the ultraviolet light coming from the auroras, while JWST captured infrared light.
'Bizarrely, the brightest light observed by Webb had no real counterpart in Hubble's pictures,' Nichols said in the statement. 'This has left us scratching our heads. In order to cause the combination of brightness seen by both Webb and Hubble, we need to have a combination of high quantities of very low-energy particles hitting the atmosphere, which was previously thought to be impossible. We still don't understand how this happens.'
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‘Flooding could end southern Appalachia': the scientists on an urgent mission to save lives
The abandoned homes and razed lots along the meandering Troublesome Creek in rural eastern Kentucky is a constant reminder of the 2022 catastrophic floods that killed dozens of people and displaced thousands more. Among the hardest hit was Fisty, a tiny community where eight homes, two shops and nine people including a woman who uses a wheelchair, her husband and two children, were swept away by the rising creek. Some residents dismissed cellphone alerts of potential flooding due to mistrust and warning fatigue, while for others it was already too late to escape. Landslides trapped the survivors and the deceased for several days. In response, geologists from the University of Kentucky secured a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and raced around collecting perishable data in hope of better understanding the worst flooding event to hit the region in a generation. On a recent morning in Fisty, Harold Baker sat smoking tobacco outside a new prefabricated home while his brother James worked on a car in a makeshift workshop. With no place else to go, the Baker family rebuilt the workshop on the same spot on Troublesome Creek with financial assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema). 'I feel depressed. Everyone else is gone now. The days are long. It feels very lonely when the storms come in,' said Baker, 55, whose four dogs drowned in 2022. With so few people left, the car repair business is way down, the road eerily quiet. Since the flood that took everything, Harold and James patrol the river every time it rains. The vigilance helped avert another catastrophe on Valentine's Day after another so-called generational storm. No one died, but the trauma, like the river, came roaring back. Related: How bad will flooding get by 2100? These AI images show US destinations underwater 'I thought we were going to lose everything again. It was scary,' said Baker. At this spot in July 2022, geologist Ryan Thigpen found flood debris on top of two-storey buildings – 118in (3 metres) off the ground. The water mark on Harold's new trailer shows the February flood hit 23in. Troublesome Creek is a 40-mile narrow tributary of the north fork of the Kentucky River, which, like many waterways across southern Appalachia, does not have a single gauge. Yet these rural mountain hollows are getting slammed over and over by catastrophic flooding – and landslides – as the climate crisis increases rainfall across the region and warmer waters in the Gulf of Mexico turbocharge storms. Two years after 45 people died in the 2022 floods, the scale of disaster grew with Hurricane Helene, which killed more than 230 people with almost half the deaths in Appalachia, after days of relentless rain turned calm streams into unstoppable torrents. Another 23 people died during the February 2025 rains, then 24 more in April during a four-day storm that climate scientists found was made significantly more likely and more severe by the warming planet. The extreme weather is making life unbearable and economically unviable for a chronically underserved region where coal was once king, and climate skepticism remains high. Yet little is known about flooding in the Appalachian region. It's why the geologists – also called earth scientists – got involved. 'This is where most people are going to die unless we create reliable warning systems and model future flood risks for mitigation and to help mountain communities plan for long-term resilience. Otherwise, these extreme flooding events could be the end of southern Appalachia,' said Thigpen. Amid accelerating climate breakdown, the urgency of the mission is clear. Yet this type of applied science could be derailed – or at least curtailed – by the unprecedented assault on science, scientists and federal agencies by Donald Trump and his billionaire donors. Danielle Baker, James's wife, had her bags packed a week in advance of the February flood and was glued to local television weather reports, which, like the geologists, rely on meteorological forecasting by the taxpayer-funded National Weather Service (NWS). She was 'scared to death' watching the creek rise so high again. But this time, the entire family, including 11 dogs and several cats, evacuated to the church on the hill, where they waited 26 hours for the water to subside. 'The people in this community are the best you could meet, but it's a ghost town now. I didn't want to rebuild so close to the creek, but we had nowhere else to go. Every time it rains, I can't sleep,' she said, wiping away tears with her shirt. Danielle was unaware of Trump's plans to dismantle Fema and slash funding from the NWS and NSF. 'A lot of people here would not know what to do without Fema's help. We need more information about the weather, better warnings, because the rains are getting worse,' she said. A day after the Guardian's visit in mid-May, an NWS office in eastern Kentucky scrambled to cover the overnight forecast as severe storms moved through the region, triggering multiple tornadoes that eventually killed 28 people. Hundreds of staff have left the NWS in recent months, through a combination of layoffs and buyouts at the behest of Trump mega-donor Elon Musk's so-called 'department of government efficiency' (Doge). It doesn't matter if people don't believe in climate change. It's going to wallop them anyway … This is a new world of extremes and cascading hazards Ryan Thigpen, geologist Yet statewide, two-thirds of Kentuckians voted for Trump last year, with his vote share closer to 80% in rural communities hit hard by extreme weather, where many still blame Barack Obama for coal mine closures. 'It doesn't matter if people don't believe in climate change. It's going to wallop them anyway. We need to think about watersheds differently. This is a new world of extremes and cascading hazards,' said Thigpen, the geologist. *** The rapidly changing climate is rendering the concept of once-in-a-generation floods, which is mostly based on research by hydrologists going back a hundred years or so, increasingly obsolete. Geologists, on the other hand, look back 10,000 years, which could help better understand flooding patterns when the planet was warmer. Thigpen is spearheading this close-knit group of earth scientists from the university's hazards team based in Lexington. On a recent field trip, nerdy jokes and constant teasing helped keep the mood light, but the scientists are clearly affected by the devastation they have witnessed since 2022. The team has so far documented more than 3,000 landslides triggered by that single extreme rain event, and are still counting. This work is part of a broader statewide push to increase climate resiliency and bolster economic growth using Kentucky-specific scientific research. Last year, the initiative got a major boost when the state secured $24m from the NSF for a five-year research project involving eight Kentucky institutions that has created dozens of science jobs and hundreds of new student opportunities. The grant helped pay for high-tech equipment – drones, radars, sensors and computers – the team needs to collect data and build models to improve hazard prediction and create real-time warning systems. After major storms, the team measures water levels and analyzes the sediment deposits left behind to calculate the scale and velocity of the flooding, which in turn helps calibrate the model. The models help better understand the impact of the topography and each community's built and natural environment – important for future mitigation. In these parts, coal was extracted using mountaintop mine removal, which drastically altered the landscape. Mining – and redirected waterways – can affect the height of a flood, according to a recent study by PhD student Meredith Swallom. A paleo-flood project is also under way, and another PhD student, Luciano Cardone, will soon begin digging into a section of the Kentucky riverbank to collect layers of sediment that holds physical clues on the date, size and velocity of ancient floods. Cardone, who found one local missionary's journal describing flooding in 1795, will provide a historical or geological perspective on catastrophic flooding in the region, which the team believe will help better predict future hazards under changing climatic conditions. All this data is analyzed at the new lab located in the Kentucky Geological Survey (KGS) department, where super-powerful computers are positioned around a ceiling-to-floor black board, with a groovy lamp and artwork to get the creative mathematical juices flowing. So far the team has developed one working flood risk model for a single section of the Kentucky River. This will serve as a template, as each watershed requires its own model so that the data is manageable, precise and useful. This sort of applied science has the capacity to directly improve the lives of local people, including many Trump voters, as well as benefiting other mountainous flood-prone areas across the US and globally. But a flood warning system can only work if there is reliable meteorological forecasting going forward. The floods have made this a ghost town. I doubt it will survive another one. If you mess with Mother Nature, you lose Thomas Hutton of Kentucky Reports suggest NWS weather balloons, which assess storm risk by measuring wind speed, humidity, temperature and other conditions that satellites may not detect, have been canceled in recent weeks from Nebraska to Florida due to staff shortages. At the busiest time for storm predictions, deadly heatwaves and wildfires, weather service staffing is down by more than 10% and, for the first time in almost half a century, some forecasting offices no longer have 24/7 cover. Trump's team is also threatening to slash $1.52bn from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), the weather service's parent agency, which also monitors climate trends, manages coastal ecosystems and supports international shipping, among other things. 'To build an effective and trusted warning system, we need hyper-local data, including accurate weather forecasts and a more robust network of gauges,' said Summer Brown, a senior lecturer at the University of Kentucky's earth and environmental sciences department. 'The thought of weakening our basic weather data is mind-boggling.' It's impossible not to worry about the cuts, especially as the grand plan is to create a southern Appalachian flood and hazard centre to better understand and prepare the entire region's mountain communities for extreme weather and related hazards, including flash floods, landslides and tornadoes. For this, the team is currently awaiting a multimillion-dollar grant decision from the NSF, in what until recently was a merit-based, peer-reviewed process at the federal agency. The NSF director resigned in April after orders from the White House to accept a 55% cut to the $9bn budget and fire half of the 1,700-person staff. Then, in an unprecedented move, a member of the governing body stepped down, lambasting Musk's unqualified Doge team for interfering in grant decisions. The days are long. It feels very lonely when the storms come in Harold Baker of Kentucky The NSF is the principal federal investor in basic science and engineering, and the proposed cut will be devastating in the US and globally. 'Rivers are different all over Appalachia, and if our research continues, we can build accurate flood and landslide models that help communities plan for storms in a changing climate,' said Jason Dortch, who set up the flood lab. 'We've submitted lots of great grant proposals, and while that is out of our hands, we will continue to push forwarded however we can.' *** Fleming-Neon is a former mining community in Letcher county with roughly 500 residents – a decline of almost 40% in the past two decades. The town was gutted by the 2022 storm, and only two businesses, a car repair shop and a florist, reopened. The launderette, pharmacy, dentist, clothing store and thrift shop were all abandoned. Randall and Bonnie Kincer, a local couple who have been married for 53 years, run the flower shop from an old movie theater on Main Street, which doubles up as a dance studio for elementary school children. The place was rammed with 120in of muddy water in 2022. In February, it was 52in, and everything still reeks of mould. The couple have been convinced by disinformation spread by conspiracy theorists that the recent catastrophic floods across the region, as well as Helene, were caused by inadequate river dredging and cloud seeding. The town's sorry plight, according to the Kincers, is down to deliberate manipulation of the weather system paid for by mining companies to flood out the community in order to gain access to lithium. (There are no significant lithium deposits in the area.) Bonnie, 74, is on the brink of giving up on the dance classes that she has taught since sophomore year, but not on Trump. 'I have total confidence in President Trump. The [federal] cuts will be tough for a little while but there's a lot of waste, so it will level out,' said Bonnie, who is angry about not qualifying for Fema assistance. 'We used all our life savings fixing the studio. But I cannot shovel any more mud, not even for the kids. I am done. I have PTSD. We are scared to death,' she said, breaking down in tears several times. The fear is understandable. On the slope facing the studio, a tiered retainer wall has been anchored into the hill to stabilize the earth and prevent an avalanche from destroying the town below. And at the edge of town, next to the power station on an old mine site, is a towering pile of black sludgy earth littered with lumps of shiny coal – the remnants of a massive landslide that happened as residents cleaned up after the February storm. Thomas Hutton's house was swamped with muddy water after the landslide blocked the creek, forcing it to temporarily change course towards a residential street. 'The floods have made this a ghost town. I doubt it will survive another one. If you mess with Mother Nature, you lose,' said Hutton, 74, a retired miner. The geologists fly drones fitted with Lidar (light detection and ranging): a remote sensing technology that uses pulsed lasers to create high-resolution, 3D, color models of the Earth's surface, and can shoot through trees and human-made structures to detect and monitor changes in terrain including landslides. The affordability and precision of the China-made Lidar has been a 'game changer' for landslides, but prices have recently rocketed thanks to Trump's tariff war. Related: Trump cuts will lead to more deaths in disasters, expert warns: 'It is really scary' The Lidar picked up fairly recent deforestation above the Fleming-Neon power plant, which likely further destabilized the earth. The team agrees that the landslide could keep moving, but without good soil data it's impossible to know when. Last year's NSF grant funded new soil and moisture sensors, as well as mini weather stations, which the landslide team is in the process of installing on 14 steep slopes in eastern Kentucky – the first time this has been done – including one opposite Hutton's house. Back at the lab, the geologists will use the data the sensors send back every 15 minutes to create models – and eventually a website where residents and local emergency managers can see how the soil moisture is changing in real time. The goal is to warn communities when there is a high landslide risk based on the soil saturation – and rain forecast. 'We have taken so many resources from these slopes. We need to understand them better,' said Sarah Johnson, a landslide expert. 'We're not sitting in an ivory tower making money from research. The work we do is about making communities safer.'
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James Webb Space Telescope captures ghostly images of clouds on Saturn's largest moon Titan
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The James Webb Space Telescope has peered into the atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon Titan, capturing the first evidence of cloud formation in this moon's northern hemisphere. Titan is the second largest moon in the solar system, right behind Jupiter's Ganymede. A team of scientists pointed the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) at Titan in November of 2022 and July of 2023. With some help from the twin telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory on the dormant Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii, the JWST found evidence of cloud convection, the process through which warmer air rises and brings moisture upward to form clouds. Clouds have been seen in Titan's southern hemisphere before, but never in the northern hemisphere, where most of the moon's seas and lakes are found. Titan has lakes and seas of liquid methane, and the moon features dynamic weather patterns just like our own planet does. That makes it unique among all of the other celestial bodies in our cosmic neighborhood, scientists say. "Titan is the only other place in our solar system that has weather like Earth, in the sense that it has clouds and rainfall onto a surface," said Conor Nixon of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and lead author of a new study about Titan's weather, in a statement. These new observations of Titan were made during the moon's summer season. NASA's Cassini–Huygens spacecraft studied Titan between 2004 and 2017 and observed cloud convection during late summer months in the southern hemisphere, but this new study is the first to watch this phenomenon during summer in Titan's northern hemisphere. Scientists say the new data could help solve some of the outstanding mysteries about Titan. "Together with ground-based observations, Webb is giving us precious new insights into Titan's atmosphere, that we hope to be able to investigate much closer-up in the future with a possible ESA mission to visit the Saturn system," said the European Space Agency's Thomas Cornet, a co-author of the new study. In addition to watching clouds form in the moon's northern hemisphere, the data gathered by the JWST's observations of Titan also helped identify a "key missing piece" of the moon's chemistry: a new organic molecule known as a methyl radical that has a "free," or unbonded, electron. Because the lakes and seas on Titan are filled with methane, this compound is a key component of many of the moon's chemical processes. Sunlight and electrons from nearby Saturn split methane molecules in Titan's atmosphere, where they then combine with other molecules to make more complex substances. Scientists are thrilled about this discovery of methyl radical in Titan's atmosphere, as it offers a window into these active chemical processes as they occur. "For the first time we can see the chemical cake while it's rising in the oven, instead of just the starting ingredients of flour and sugar, and then the final, iced cake," said astrochemist and study co-author Stefanie Milam of the Goddard Space Flight Center, in a NASA statement. RELATED STORIES: — Surf's up! Liquid methane waves on Saturn moon Titan may erode shores of alien lakes and rivers — There's liquid on Titan, Saturn's largest moon. But something's missing and scientists are confused — NASA's Dragonfly nuclear-powered helicopter clears key hurdle ahead of 2028 launch toward huge Saturn moon Titan But the story won't end here, as scientists still want to know more about Titan and its chemistry. While the Cassini-Huygens mission revealed a great deal about the moon, nothing can surpass actually sending a spacecraft onto the moon itself to perform in-situ, or on-location, science. To accomplish this, NASA is planning the ambitious Dragonfly mission, which will send a nuclear-powered octocopter onto the surface of Titan, where it will spend three years "hopping" from location to location and studying the moon's chemistry. Dragonfly is scheduled to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in 2028, and reach the Titan in 2034, if all goes according to plan. Dragonfly recently passed its Critical Design Review test, meaning it can now move on to being manufactured. The explorer will study Titan's potential habitability, seeking out signs of prebiotic chemistry as well as keeping a robotic eye out for any signs of life. A study of the summer atmosphere of Titan's northern hemisphere has been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
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James Webb Space Telescope reveals largest-ever panorama of the early universe
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have unveiled the largest map of the early universe to date, a sweeping cosmic panorama that offers seasoned scientists and curious stargazers alike a front-row seat to the ancient cosmos. The images come from COSMOS-Web, the largest observing program the James Webb Space Telescope undertook in its first year. It surveyed a patch of sky equivalent to the width of three full moons placed side-by-side, the telescope's widest observation area to date. The survey stitched together more than 10,000 exposures, revealing nearly 800,000 galaxies, many of which shine from the universe's earliest eras. Harnessing the abundance of data that came from this effort, on Thursday (June 5), the team released the largest contiguous image ever captured by the JWST, along with a free, interactive catalog detailing the properties of each galaxy — a cosmic record that's as vast as it is richly detailed. "I don't know if the James Webb Space Telescope will ever cover an area of this size again, and so I think it'll be a good reference and a good data set that people will use for many years," Jeyhan Kartaltepe, an astrophysicist at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York and the lead researcher of COSMOS-Web, told "The hope is that, now, anybody at any institution can make use of this data for their own science." When the JWST launched in 2021, the global COSMOS-Web team comprising nearly 50 researchers from institutions around the world was awarded over 200 hours of observation time, the most allocated to any project in the telescope's inaugural year. While many JWST studies zoom in on small, deep slices of sky, COSMOS-Web prioritized breadth, capturing a wider cosmic canvas that brought to light 10 times more galaxies than astronomers anticipated from these early epochs. "It was incredible to reveal galaxies that were previously invisible at other wavelengths, and very gratifying to finally see them appear on our computers," Maximilien Franco, postdoctoral researcher of astrophysics at the University of Hertfordshire in the U.K., said in a statement. The JWST's expansive view allows astronomers not only to catalog distant galaxies, but also to study how their characteristics — including size, shape and brightness — are shaped by their cosmic environments, such as whether they reside in isolation or in crowded regions. "That tells us a lot about what influenced them as they evolved," Kartaltepe said. Alongside the catalog, the COSMOS-Web team has published a series of scientific papers exploring the data. One study, posted to the preprint archive arXiv on Wednesday (June 4), examines the most luminous galaxies at the centers of galaxy groups, tracing how their structure and star forming activity have co-evolved over the past 12 billion years. A key science goal of the project was to map the earliest structures during the Reionization Era (which fell more than 13 billion years ago) when the first galaxies ignited and began clearing the thick hydrogen fog that blanketed the early cosmos. To achieve this, Kartaltepe and her team plan early galaxies as tracers to measure the size of "reionization bubbles," vast regions where light from stars and galaxies carved clearings in the primordial haze. "That's not something we finished yet," Kartaltepe said. "But that was the main goal, and something that we're really excited about." Another paper, which was also posted to arXiv on Wednesday, tests a machine learning technique that can estimate the physical properties of galaxies in the massive dataset. The team also developed a new method to measure the brightness of distant galaxies more accurately. Unlike traditional techniques that simply sum the light within a fixed area, this approach models how light is spread across a galaxy, enabling more precise measurements that allow researchers to combine JWST images with blurrier ground-based data without losing important details. Related Stories: — James Webb Space Telescope finds coldest exoplanet ever seen, and it orbits a dead star — James Webb Space Telescope captures stunning images of bright auroras on Jupiter (video) — Calling citizen scientists! Help NASA's Galaxy Zoo classify galaxies seen by James Webb Space Telescope Three more studies detail the team's data processing efforts over the past two years, a meticulous process involving aligning and cleaning more than 10,000 individual images. As a brand-new observatory, the JWST brought unexpected challenges. The telescope's images included unforeseen artifacts, such as noise patterns and distortions, which the team had to carefully correct. Despite these hurdles, the JWST outperformed pre-launch models predicting how faint or distant galaxies it could detect, said Kartaltepe. "The reality turned out to be better — we were able to go deeper than what we expected." The catalog holds "incredible potential," she added. "There's still so much we don't know."
