Three images of Jupiter show the gas giant in three different types of light — infrared, visible, and ultraviolet. The image on the left was taken in infrared by the Near-InfraRed Imager (NIRI) instrument at Gemini North in Hawaiʻi, the northern member of the international Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. The center image was taken in visible light by the Wide Field Camera 3 on the Hubble Space Telescope. The image on the right was taken in ultraviolet light by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3. All of the observations were taken on 11 January 2017. (INTERNATIONAL GEMINI OBSERVATORY/NOIRLAB/NSF/AURA/NASA/ESA, M.H. WONG AND I. DE PATER (UC BERKELEY) ET AL.)

‘Triple Vision’ Image Of Jupiter Shows What’s Beneath Its Clouds

Infrared, visible, and ultraviolet combine to show us Jupiter’s features as never before.

The largest planet in our Solar System, Jupiter, is our own ‘failed star.’

The best evidence-based classification scheme of planets is to categorize them as either rocky, Neptune-like, Jupiter-like or stellar-like. Jupiter is the only planet in our Solar System to have crossed the mass threshold to begin to experience self-compression, but is a long way off from initiating fusion to become a true star. (CHEN AND KIPPING, 2016, VIA HTTPS://ARXIV.ORG/PDF/1603.08614V2.PDF)

Although it gravitationally undergoes self-compression, it’s too light to initiate nuclear fusion.

This cutaway of Jupiter showcases a number of its layers. In the interior, Jupiter is the hottest location in the Solar System outside of the Sun’s interior or corona, with temperatures of tens of thousands of degrees. However, the tops of its atmosphere are extremely cold, at negative hundreds of degrees. (WIKIMEDIA COMMONS USER KELVINSONG)

Jupiter’s enormous core temperatures — 24,000 °C (43,000 °F) — contrast with its icy cloud-tops: -145 °C (-234 °F).

This visible-light image of Jupiter was created from data captured on 11 January 2017 using the Wide Field Camera 3 on the Hubble Space Telescope. Near the top, a long brown feature called a ‘brown barge’ extends 72,000 kilometers (nearly 45,000 miles) in the east-west direction. The Great Red Spot stands out prominently in the lower left, while the smaller feature nicknamed Red Spot Jr. (known to Jovian scientists as Oval BA) appears to its lower right. (NASA/ESA/NOIRLAB/NSF/AURA/M.H. WONG AND I. DE PATER (UC BERKELEY) ET AL.; ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: M. ZAMANI)

The familiar bands, spots, and turbulence are superficial, optical features.

The first color movie of Jupiter from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shows what it would look like to peel the entire globe of Jupiter, stretch it out on a wall into the form of a rectangular map, and watch its atmosphere evolve with time. The familiar bands, turbulent features, and red (and white) spots can all be seen, but these are merely the topmost features. (NASA/JPL/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA)