The tug-of-war between space-based and ground-based telescopes continues, with today's release of what's being called the sharpest full-planet image of Jupiter taken by an on-the-ground observatory.
—Image courtesy ESO
[versus]
Jupiter, as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2007
—Image courtesy NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI)
An international team used the ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile to stare right at Jupiter for almost two hours straight.
The resulting infrared image revealed that Jupiter has lowered its belt. The bulk of the haze within the bight band around Jupiter's midsection has migrated south by more than 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) since 2005, the researchers said.
"The change we see in the haze could be related to big changes in cloud patterns associated with last year's planet-wide upheaval, but we need to look at more data to narrow down precisely when the changes occurred," team member Mike Wong said in a press release.
[Incidentally, the global upheaval he's referring to involved massive changes in cloud patterns and other wild weather features observed in 2007.]
In an interview with NatGeo News reporter Richard A. Lovett, lead researcher Franck Marchis, a planetary astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, and the SETI Institute, said of the new image: "We have something comparable to or even better than the Hubble Space Telescope."
Wow. But this isn't the first time researchers using ground-based 'scopes have compared their work to products of the aging but much beloved Hubble.
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