OK so you know how Jupiter is that giant striped planet we've all seen a thousand times in textbooks and documentaries and weirdly satisfying space videos? Yeah well it turns out we've been looking at like half the picture this whole time because NASA researcher Heidi Becker just photographed stuff around Jupiter that no human has ever seen before.

We're talking the dark sides of Jupiter's moons. Its ghostly rings. Regions of the Jovian system that have been sitting in shadow, and now Becker has figured out how to capture them in a way nobody has managed before. The Jovian system (yes that's what it's actually called and yes I love it) just got a whole new photo album.

According to New Scientist, Becker has been working with data from NASA's Juno spacecraft, and the images she produced are, and I cannot stress this enough, absolutely otherworldly. Which feels like a dumb thing to say about a literal different planet but you know what I mean. The rings of Jupiter are this faint spectral thing, and personally I feel like you basically never hear about them because everyone is too busy staring at the Great Red Spot. Now we have photographs of them captured in scattered light like something out of a dream.

And the moons! Becker captured the dark sides of Jupiter's moons, the parts that sit in Jupiter's enormous shadow. We've seen the sun-facing sides plenty of times from other missions but these new images show the far sides from angles and in light we've never had before. She found a way to capture them using reflected light from Jupiter itself bouncing off... ok this is where my brain starts to get a little fuzzy on the physics but essentially Jupiter is so big and reflects so much sunlight that its own glow illuminates the dark sides of its moons. And she captured that!!

like. come ON. that is so cool.

I think the thing that gets me about this is how much of space is still just... sitting there in the dark, waiting for someone clever enough to figure out how to look at it in a new way. We sent a spacecraft all the way to Jupiter and we're STILL finding completely new angles and techniques to see things nobody has seen. She didn't invent a new telescope or build some massive new instrument. She figured out how to use existing data to capture light from places so dim that the results took everyone by surprise.

The moons of Jupiter are some of the most fascinating objects in our entire solar system. Europa has a subsurface ocean. Ganymede is bigger than Mercury. Io is the most volcanically active body we know of. And now we can see parts of them that have been hidden from us until now.

I've said this before and I'll keep saying it because it keeps being true: the universe is way more creative and unhinged than we give it credit for. There are ghostly rings around the biggest planet in our solar system and we just... never had photos like THESE until now. What else is sitting in the dark up there, waiting for the right person to figure out how to see it?