A frightening, nightmare ‘face’ spotted in Jupiter’s turbulent clouds: ScienceAlert

Jupiter may be a fickle, uninhabitable ball of stormy gas, but that doesn’t mean it can’t give us screaming screams from time to time.

Even aside from their astonishing size, and the storms that could easily engulf our entire globe, the cloud formations that mix and swirl across the planet can take on some alarming forms. The image taken by NASA’s Juno probe in early September is almost reminiscent of, and perhaps evocative of, a face full of anxiety and dread Edvard Munch.

During its 54th flyby, or Perejove, on September 7, 2023, It captured an area far to the north known as Jet N7.

Jets on Jupiter are wind streams that separate the planet’s stripes, pale belts, and brown and red areas. Jets penetrate deep into Jupiter’s atmosphere, and can generate some fascinating and complex cloud patterns in the cloud tops.

Juno reached a distance of about 7,700 kilometers (4,800 miles) above Jupiter’s cloud tops, just in time to catch up with the terminator atop Jet N7.

This is the fine line between day and night, and it is extremely useful for science. This is because sunlight strikes indirectly, causing shadows to lengthen, just as shadows on the ground lengthen at dusk.

This makes features more visible in Jupiter’s cloud tops, like seeing the texture in an oil painting when lit from the side. Scientists can study these features to try to figure out the dynamics of Jupiter’s strange wild storms.

There’s still a lot we don’t know about the largest planet in the solar system, and how it works, but the technology we’re pointing in its direction is slowly revealing its secrets.

Juno is a big part of that. Since its first perihelion in July 2016, it has oscillated close to Jupiter Every month or two, each time giving us new glimpses of the planet’s amazing clouds. Because we are humans, and prone to recognizing visual patterns known as pareidolia that can lead to the recognition of shapes and features, we sometimes detect recognizable features in Jovian clouds.

Sometimes these are animals. But it can be said that the strongest form of pareidolia is facial pareidolia. We can see faces in a smear of gunk on a bathroom tile, or the shape of leaves in a distant tree. This effect is so strong that we can attribute emotion, age, and gender to these imaginary faces.

So finding a face in Jupiter’s clouds is not surprising. It’s not even surprising that we can identify what we think it might feel like. The surprising thing is that this does not happen very often.

Maybe we just need to look more closely.

You can download a full-sized version of the image On the NASA websitejust in case you need a new phone wallpaper for Halloween.