Another “mystery” on gaseous Jupiter?
Does the photo show a face or something else?
An amateur astronomer processed data from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Juno probe and revealed what appear to be distorted eyes, nose and mouth.
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A mysterious face on Jupiter
“Jupiter’s Juno Mission Spots Ghostly ‘Face’ Just Before Halloween,” states in a statement by the US space agency. “On September 7, 2023, during its 54th close flyby of Jupiter, the probe captured an image of the northernmost regions of the gas giant planet called Jet N7. The photo shows storm clouds and storms along the dividing line between the day and night sides of the planet.”
Amateur astronomer Vladimir Tarasov noticed something interesting in the JunoCam data. At the time the raw photo was taken, Juno was about 4,800 kilometers above Jupiter’s cloud tops. Raw information is available to the public for a long time, who can view, study and process it into image products.
A hoax called pareidolia
We can see the grinning face on Jupiter thanks to a phenomenon called pareidolia, a psychological tendency that leads people to find meaning in random images or sounds. The universe is an endless source of inspiration for pareidolia. Let’s recall the uproar among scientists and the lay public caused by a photograph taken on Mars by the Viking probe in 1976. In the area of Cydonia Mensae, it captured a feature that resembled an alien face.
Before its 54th flyby of Jupiter — since arriving at the gas giant in 2016 — the probe had traveled more than 510 million kilometers and made close encounters with three of the planet’s four largest moons, the icy moons Europa and Ganymede and the fiery moon Io.
The four large moons, including the frozen Callisto, are collectively known as the “Galilean moons” after the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, who first observed them in 1610.
Juno was not actually intended to study these moons; its instruments and sensors are intended more for exploring Jupiter’s atmosphere and interior. Despite this, this NASA satellite managed to collect important data about the Jovian moons during its flybys of the gas giant.
Preview photo source: NASA, source: NASA, Metro
2023-10-27 08:51:43
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