Neptune appears with a new image thanks to the space telescope james webbwhich are the clearest view of rings in more than 30 years and seven of its many moons.
Infrared view from the new telescope reveals this icy giant beneath a whole new lightIn a note the European Space Agency (ESA), which participates in James Webb together with the American NASA and the Canadian CSA.
The images provide a clear view of the rings, some of which had not been seen until now and others that had not been captured at that level of detail since the spacecraft. Voyager 2 came closest to the planet in 1989, clearly showing the fainter dust lanes surrounding the planet.
Neptune, discovered in 1846, is 30 times farther from the sun than the earth and orbits in one of the darkest parts of the solar system. An afternoon there is comparable to a twilight twilight on Earth, the ESA reminds.
Webb caught too seven of Neptune’s fourteen known moons and in the image you see a very bright point of light with the characteristic diffraction peaks seen in many of the telescope images, but no starbut the planet’s most unusual moon, Triton.
Covered in an icy sheen of condensed nitrogen, Triton reflects on average 70% of the sunlight that reaches it, making it much larger than Neptune, as the planet’s atmosphere has been obscured by methane absorption at Webb wavelengths. Triton has a strange retrograde orbit around Neptune, leading astronomers to speculate that this moon was actually an object Kuiper belt captured by the planet.
Additional studies of Triton and Neptune, remember the ESA note. Neptune is characterized by its an ice giant due to the chemical composition of the interior, which can be clearly seen in the characteristic blue appearance of the images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope – precursor to the James Webb – in visible wavelengths, caused by small amounts of gaseous methane.
In Webb’s footage, thanks to his near infrared camera Neptune doesn’t seem blue. In addition, a thin line of brightness is observed around the planet’s equator, which could be a visual signature of the global atmospheric circulation that drives the planet’s winds and storms.
Neptune’s 164-year orbit means the north pole is just out of astronomers’ view, but the Webb images hint”an intriguing glow in that area.”
A previously known vortex at the South Pole is evident in Webb’s vision, but for the first time it has been revealed a continuous band of clouds that surrounds it.
