The world’s most powerful telescope has captured images of Jupiter showing faint rings around the planet and two tiny moons against a glittering background of galaxies.

The images taken by the James Webb Telescope also captured unprecedented views of Jupiter’s northern and southern lights.

The photos also show Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a storm big enough to swallow Earth, moving across the planet alongside countless smaller storms.

One wide-field picture shows faint rings around the solar system’s biggest planet as well as two tiny moons.

“We’ve never seen Jupiter like this. It’s all quite incredible,” planetary astronomer Imke de Pater, of the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement.

He helped to lead the observation.

“We hadn’t really expected it to be this good, to be honest.”

The infrared images were artificially coloured in blue, white, green, yellow and orange, according to the US-French research team, to make the features stand out.

NASA and the European Space Agency’s £8.5bn successor to the Hubble Space Telescope rocketed away at the end of last year and has been observing the cosmos since summer.

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Scientists hope to behold the dawn of the universe with Webb, peering all the way back to when the first stars and galaxies were forming 13.7 billion years ago.

The observatory, which is positioned one million miles from Earth, will also scan for signs of alien life.

Scientists released the shots of the solar system’s biggest planet on Monday.

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