Jupiter has a spooky new look in this sharp infrared photo
Because infrared light gets trapped by thick clouds, the infrared images of the planet create a jack-o-lantern effect, as seen above: Jupiter’s atmosphere glows bright in thin haze and light cloud coverage but dark in areas of thick clouds. (International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA M.H. Wong (UC Berkeley) and team Acknowledgments: Mahdi Zamani./)If you think understanding and predicting Earth’s weather is a doozy, Jupiter’s is quite literally a raging nightmare. Scientists have known for a while that the gas giant is characterized by powerful lightning strikes and enormous storm systems, but understanding what goes on in finer detail has been a challenge. To better understand how these violent storms work, researchers have combined data from a number of imaging systems: Juno, which has been orbiting Jupiter since 2011, the Hubble Space Telescope, which just celebrated its 30th birthday in orbit, and the Gemini observatory, a pair of telescopes that sit atop mountains...