James Webb Telescope Snaps Clearest Image of Neptune's Rings in Decades

pcmag.com:

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is giving astronomers a rare view of Neptune’s outer rings. It recently snapped(Opens in a new window) an image of the eighth and most distant planet in our solar system (sorry Pluto), which also captured Neptune’s hard-to-see rings.  

NASA says the image offers the clearest view of the planet’s ring in three decades. Back in 1989, the Voyager space probe flew by Neptune and supplied(Opens in a new window) photographic proof of the rings while taking stunning photos of the planet’s blue-colored atmosphere.   

The James Webb telescope took the image with its powerful infrared sensors(Opens in a new window), which can capture additional light from Neptune and the planet’s icy rings beyond basic ground-based telescopes. 

“It has been three decades since we last saw these faint, dusty rings, and this is the first time we’ve seen them in the infrared,” says Heidi Hammel, a scientist for the James Webb telescope. The same image also shows “Neptune’s fainter dust bands,” along with several of its moons, including Galatea, Proteus, and Naiad, according to NASA. 

Since James Webb snapped the image in infrared, the planet Neptune does not appear blue, like it did in the Voyager space probe photos. “In fact, the methane gas (in Neptune’s atmosphere) so strongly absorbs red and infrared light that the planet is quite dark at these near-infrared wavelengths, except where high-altitude clouds are present,” NASA says. 

“Such methane-ice clouds are prominent as bright streaks and spots, which reflect sunlight before it is absorbed by methane gas,” the space agency adds. “More subtly, a thin line of brightness circling the planet’s equator could be a visual signature of global atmospheric circulation