James Webb Telescope Snaps Stunning Shot of Uranus (Let the Jokes Fly)

pcmag.com:

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured a new image of Uranus, offering a rare view of the icy rings around the seventh planet from the Sun.

The photo, released(Opens in a new window) today by the European Space Agency (ESA), offers one of the clearest images of Uranus’s rings yet. “Uranus has 13 known rings and 11 of them are visible in this image,” the ESA tweeted(Opens in a new window). “Some of these rings are so bright with Webb that when they are close together, they appear to merge into a larger ring.”

The JWST captured the image with its infrared sensors, which can pull in additional light from the far reaches of space. “At infrared wavelengths, and with Webb’s greater sensitivity, we see more detail, showing how dynamic the atmosphere of Uranus really is,” the ESA says. 

Previously, the planet’s faintest rings were only imaged by the ground-based Keck Observatory(Opens in a new window) in Hawaii, and by the Voyager 2(Opens in a new window) spacecraft, which flew by Uranus in 1986. At the time, Voyager snapped photos of the planet, showing it to be a uniform sphere(Opens in a new window) of cyan blue due to its methane-heavy atmosphere. 

JWST, on the other hand, could observe some of the differences in Uranus’s atmosphere. “On the right side of the planet is an area of brightening at the pole facing the Sun, known as a polar cap. This polar cap is unique to Uranus — it seems to appear when the pole enters direct sunlight in the summer and vanishes in the autumn,” the ESA says.   

The space telescope also “revealed a surprising aspect of the polar cap: a subtle enhanced brightening at the center of the cap,” which other telescopes have never been able to detect. Meanwhile, the image also shows two