GHOSTLY RINGS OF NEPTUNE SHINE IN NEW WEBB IMAGES
When it comes to planetary rings, Saturn is the king. But now a new contender enters the ring, courtesy of a stunning image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. Astronomers have known for decades that the ice giant, located about 30 times farther from the Sun than Earth, has five rings made chiefly of icy dust. The new image reveals those frigid rings in crisper detail than any survey since the Voyager 2 probe passed within a few thousand miles of Neptune in 1989. “In addition to several bright, narrow rings, the Webb images clearly show Neptune’s fainter dust bands,” researchers wrote. “Webb’s extremely stable and precise image quality permits these very faint rings to be detected so close to Neptune.”
Floating near the edge of our Solar System, Neptune is invisible to the naked eye. But in visible-light images taken by Voyager 2 and the Hubble Space Telescope, Neptune appears a striking blue. That colouration comes from methane in the planet’s cloudy atmosphere, which likely stretches down to great depths within the planet before melding into a superhot ocean of melted ice, ammonia and other compounds. To Webb, which uses a special sensor to capture light at near-infrared wavelengths, those methane clouds shine eerily with reflected sunlight, giving the planet a more ghostly white appearance.