Neptune and its rings shown in a new form by the Webb telescope
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New images released Wednesday by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveal Neptune and the planet’s hard-to-detect rings in a new light.
“It’s been three decades since we last saw these faint dusty rings, and this is the first time we’re seeing them in infrared,” said Heidi Hummel, a Neptune expert and multidisciplinary scientist at the Webb Project.
In addition to several distinct narrow rings, Webb’s images show fainter dust lanes of Neptune. Some of the rings have not been observed since NASA’s Voyager 2 obtained the first photographic evidence of the existence of Neptune’s rings during a flyby in 1989.
Dark, cold and blown by supersonic winds, Neptune is the most distant planet in our solar system. The planet and its neighbor Uranus are known as “ice giants” because their interiors are made up of heavier elements than the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, which are richer in hydrogen and helium.
In the new images, Neptune appears white, as opposed to the typical blue color it has in images taken at visible wavelengths of light. This is because methane gas, part of the planet’s chemistry, does not appear blue to Webb’s near-infrared camera (NIRCam).
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