Hubble Sees Jupiter Change its Stripes

The giant stormy planet Jupiter has gone through a makeover, as seen in these comparative Hubble Space Telescope images taken nearly 11 months apart. Several months ago the dark Southern Equatorial Belt (SEB) vanished. The last time this happened was in the early 1970s, when we didn't have powerful enough telescopes to study the change in detail.

Left A Hubble picture from July 23, 2009, captures the planet's common appearance over the past several decades with alternating zones of high altitude ammonia ice crystal clouds (white strips) and belts of lower altitude material (dark strip). The image was taken to study a wispy patch of dark debris in the far Southern Hemisphere caused by the suspected explosion of an asteroid plunging into the lower atmosphere on July 19, 2009.

Right A Hubble picture from June 7, 2010, reveals a slightly higher altitude layer of white ammonia ice crystal clouds that appears to obscure the deeper, darker belt clouds of the SEB. The team predicts that these clouds should clear out in a few months.

Hubble also resolved a string of dark spots farther south of the vanished belt. Based on past observations, the Hubble Jupiter team expects to see similar spots appear in the SEB, right before its white clouds clear out in a few months.

These natural color comparative planet portraits were taken in visible light with Hubble's new Wide Field Camera 3.

About the colours

The image is a composite of separate exposures made by the WFC3 instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope. Three filters were used to sample narrow wavelength ranges. The color results from assigning different hues (colors) to each monochromatic image. In this case, the assigned colors are: Blue: F395N (395 nm) Green: F502N (502 nm) Red: F631N (631 nm)

About the data

The image was created from Hubble data from proposal 12119 : A. Simon-Miller (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), H. Hammel (Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.), I. de Pater (University of California, Berkeley), L. Fletcher (University of Oxford), G. Orton (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), M. Wong (University of California, Berkley), A. Sanchez-Lavega (University of the Basque Country, Spain), J. Clarke (Boston University), and K. Noll (STScI).

Note: The comparison data from HST WFC3 observations taken in 2009 are from proposals 12003 and 12045 : H. Hammel (Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.), A. Simon-Miller (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), J. Clarke (Boston University), I. de Pater (University of California, Berkeley), K. Noll (STScI), G. Orton (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), A. Sanchez-Lavega (University of the Basque Country, Spain), and M. Wong (University of California, Berkley).