The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope published its first image of Neptune. Webb captured the clearest view of this peculiar planet’s rings in more than 30 years and its cameras are also revealing the ice giant in a whole new light.
Most striking about Webb’s new image is the crisp view of the planet’s dynamic rings — some of which haven’t been seen at all, let alone with this clarity, since the Voyager 2 flyby in 1989. In addition to several bright narrow rings, the Webb images clearly show Neptune’s fainter dust bands. Webb’s extremely stable and precise image quality also permits these very faint rings to be detected so close to Neptune.
Read here the ESA article from September 21, 2022.
Image: Credit: © NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI; Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) image of Neptune, taken on 12 July 2022, brings the planet’s rings into full focus for the first time in more than three decades. The most prominent features of Neptune’s atmosphere in this image are a series of bright patches in the planet’s southern hemisphere that represent high-altitude methane-ice clouds. More subtly, a thin line of brightness circling the planet’s equator could be a visual signature of global atmospheric circulation that powers Neptune’s winds and storms. Additionally, for the first time, Webb has teased out a continuous band of high-latitude clouds surrounding a previously-known vortex at Neptune’s southern pole.