天文学家创造了一个前所未有的红外木星肖像

天文学家创造了一个前所未有的红外木星肖像

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.

自从400年前我们第一次在夜空中发现木星以来，我们就一直无法将目光从它身上移开。这不仅仅是因为这颗气态巨星恰好是太阳系中最大的行星。木星也是我们银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.

它的大气层被超级风暴搅动着，其中许多风暴已经肆虐了数百年。这些风暴以40英里高的雷雨云为特征，这些雷雨云产生的闪电强度至少是我们在地球上所知道的任何东西的三倍。

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.

然后是那个大红斑，一个超级巨星，它的宽度是我们整个星球的两倍。现在，多亏了哈勃太空望远镜、双子座天文台和朱诺号宇宙飞船的合作，我们可以看到木星的戏剧性究竟有多深。

"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.

“我们想知道木星的大气层是如何工作的，”参与该项目的加州大学伯克利分校天文学家迈克尔·王(Michael Wong)在一份新闻稿中说。

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.

为了做到这一点，研究人员将哈勃和双子座的多波长观测结果与朱诺轨道的近距离观测结果结合起来。他们的发现发表在本周的《天体物理学杂志增刊》上，探索了闪电爆发和气旋涡旋的起源。

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.

在这个过程中，双子座、哈勃和朱诺的重叠观测用红外线描绘了整个行星，给我们提供了这个终极戏剧女王的最详细的肖像——特别是大红斑的超级巨星。

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.

原来那个闷燃的地方布满了洞。研究人员指出，红外地图揭示了红点上的暗斑并不是不同类型的云，而是云层的缝隙。

"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."

“这有点像南瓜灯，”黄在新闻稿中写道。“你可以看到来自无云地区的明亮的红外光，但有云的地方，红外线就会变暗。”

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.

在哈勃望远镜、双子座望远镜和朱诺号宇宙飞船的帮助下，科学家们说他们现在可以探测木星愤怒的大气层的深度——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行星科学家艾米·西蒙在新闻稿中解释道:“因为我们现在可以通过几个不同的天文台和不同的波长获得这些高分辨率的图像，所以我们对木星的天气了解得更多了。这相当于我们的气象卫星。我们终于可以开始研究天气周期了。”