The James Webb Space Telescope recently captured an image of Uranus, showing in great detail the ice giant’s ring system, its brightest moons and its dynamic atmosphere. The observation, made Feb. 6., 2023, follows a similarly stunning photo it captured recently of the solar system’s other ice giant, Neptune.

Dear Commons Community,

The James Webb Space Telescope recently captured an image of Uranus, detailing the ice giant’s ring system, its brightest moons and its zestful atmosphere.

The observation, made Feb. 6,comes on the heels of a similar photo the powerful telescope captured of the solar system’s other ice giant, Neptune.

According to a news release from NASA, the new photograph of Uranus features “dramatic rings as well as bright features in the planet’s atmosphere.”

“The Webb data demonstrates the observatory’s unprecedented sensitivity for the faintest dusty rings, which have only ever been imaged by two other facilities: the Voyager 2 spacecraft as it flew past the planet in 1986, and the Keck Observatory with advanced adaptive optics,” NASA wrote in the Thursday release.

“Uranus has never looked better,” the NASA Webb Telescope tweeted from its social media account on Thursday.

The world’s largest and most powerful space telescope has been capturing images of thousands of galaxies – some of which formed billions of years ago after the Big Bang and some of the faintest objects ever observed.

The telescope was designed to explore every phase of cosmic history, NASA says.

The seventh planet from Sun, Uranus is unique, according to NASA. The planet rotates on its side, at roughly a 90-degree angle from the plane of its orbit. This causes extreme seasons since the planet’s poles experience many years of constant sunlight followed by an equal number of years of complete darkness.

The planet is characterized as an ice giant due to the chemical make-up of its interior, the space agency said. Most of its mass is thought to be a hot, dense fluid of “icy materials – water, methane, and ammonia – above a small rocky core.”

Uranus has 13 known rings and 11 of them can been seen in the new photograph, NASA reported.

“Some of these rings are so bright with Webb that when they are close together, they appear to merge into a larger ring,” according to NASA. “Nine are classed as the main rings of the planet, and two are the fainter dusty rings (such as the diffuse zeta ring closest to the planet) that weren’t discovered until the 1986 flyby by Voyager 2.”

The powerful telescope also captured many of of Uranus’ 27 known moons, NASA wrote.

“It is just the tip of the iceberg of what Webb can do when observing this mysterious planet.”

Marvelous work!

Tony

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