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Cape Canaveral: Neptune and its rings haven’t looked this good in decades.
NASA released new glamour shots of our solar system’s outermost planet on Wednesday taken by the James Webb Space Telescope.
The James Webb telescope has captured seven of Neptune’s 14 known moons: Galatea, Naiad, Thalassa, Despina, Proteus, Larissa, and Triton. Neptune’s large and unusual moon, Triton, dominates this Webb portrait of Neptune as a very bright point of light sporting the signature diffraction spikes seen in many of Webb’s images. Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera also revealed the planet’s rings, which have not been seen with this clarity in more than three decades.Credit:NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
The pictures taken in July show not only Neptune’s thin rings, but its faint dust bands, never before observed in the infrared wavelength, as well as seven of its 14 known moons.
Webb showed Jupiter at its best in a series of fresh photos released last month.
Launched less than a year ago, the $10 billion Webb is spending most of its time peering much deeper into the universe. Astronomers hope to see back to almost the beginning of time when the first stars and galaxies were forming.
NASA’s Voyager 2 was the first spacecraft to see Neptune in all its gaseous glory, during a 1989 flyby.
This composite image provided by NASA on Wednesday shows three side-by-side images of Neptune. From left, a photo taken by Voyager 2 in 1989, Hubble in 2021 and Webb in 2022. Credit:NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI via AP
No other spacecraft have visited the icy, blue planet. So it’s been three decades since astronomers last saw these rings with such detail and clarity, said the Space Science Institute’s Heidi Hammel, a planetary astronomer working with Webb.
Hammel tweeted that she wept when she saw the rings, yelling and making “my kids, my mom, even my cats look”.