Jupiter’s ring wasn’t discovered until Voyager 1 visited the planet in 1979. Not only is it thin and faint, scattered light from the bright planet Jupiter washes out the ring. It is virtually impossible for even the best Earth based telescopes to see Jupiter’s ring. But the NAOJ’s Subaru Telescope was able to overcome those difficulties to take this picture.
The red glow around Jupiter is light from the planet scattered by Earth’s atmosphere and the instrument optics. The red lines in the lower-right of the picture are images of Jupiter’s moon Thebe (J XIV). It moved during the 13 minutes required to take this picture, so it blurred and stretched out.
Unlike Saturn’s ring which is composed primarily of water-ice particles, Jupiter’s ring is made of dust. This observation used a special filter to observe water-ice. That data is represented by blue in this false-color infrared image. As you can see there is almost no blue in the ring.
Astronomers believe that Saturn’s ring was made when comets, asteroids, or now vanished moons came too close to the planet and were ripped apart by Saturn’s strong gravity. In contrast, the dust in Jupiter’s ring seems to be coming from micro-meteor impacts throwing out material from the surfaces of Jupiter’s moons.
Author: Ramsey Lundock
Download: Maximum resolution (751 x 716, 95KB)
Related Links: Subaru Telescope
Image Data
Observation Date: May25, 2005
Telescope: The Subaru Telescope (Effective Diameter 8.2 m), Cassegrain Focus
Wavelengths (Filters): K’ (2.20µm), H2O Ice (3.05µm), L (3.77µm)
Color Code: Blue (H2O Ice), Green (L), Red (K’)
Instrument: IRCS (Infrared Camera and Spectrograph)
Exposure Time: 270s & 300s (K’), 200s (H2O Ice), 60s (L)
Location: Mauna Kea, Hawai’i Island
Observers: Takato & Terada
Image Processing: Ramsey Lundock
Object Name: Jupiter
Image Size: cropped to approximately 43 arcseconds
Copyright: National Astronomical Observatory of Japan
