© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Pretend you did not read that headline out loud in your mind for a moment. But yes, the James Webb Space Telescope captured an image of the planet Uranus and its rings.
In 2022, Webb took the clearest image of Neptune, its rings and its Moons since 1989, now it has made Uranus its target. In the image of Uranus shared by NASA, the rings and bright features of the planet can be seen distinctly.
The planet is referred to as an ice giant because of the chemical makeup of its interior. Scientists believe that most of its mass is a hot and dense fluid of “icy” materials including water, methane and ammonia. This fluid lies above a small rocky core.
Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun and it is a bit of an oddball. It rotates on its side at a roughly 90-degree angle from the planet of its orbit. Due to this, the planet’s poles experience extreme seasons, with many years of constant sunlight followed by an equally long period spent in complete darkness. The planet takes 84 years to orbit the Sun.
Right now, it is late spring on the planet’s northern pole, which is visible in the image. The northern part of Uranus will next experience summer in 2028.
The last time a clear image of Uranus was taken was when the Voyager 2 craft visited the planet in 1986. At the time, it was summer at the south pole. Right now, the south pole is on the dark side of the planet, out of our view and facing the darkness of space.
While Saturn is famous for its characteristic rings, there are other planets in the solar system that have distinct rings. Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune fall into this category.
Uranus is known to have 13 rings and 11 of them are visible in this image shared by NASA. Some of these rings are so bright but they are close together. In this Webb image, some of them seem to merge to appear as a larger ring.
Nine of Uranus’s 13 rings are classified as the main rings of the planet while two are fainter dusty rings.
The James Webb Space Telescope also captured many of the planet’s 27 known moons but some of them are too small and faint to be seen here. The six brightest Moons can be seen in the wide-view image below.
On the right side of the planet in the image, you can see a bright, almost-white area. This is known as a polar cap and is unique to Uranus. The polar cap seems to appear when the pole enters direct sunlight in the summer and it vanishes in the fall. According to the space agency, Webb’s data can help scientists understand this mechanism that remains mysterious for now.
In fact, Webb has already revealed a surprising aspect of the planet’s polar cap–a subtly enhanced brightness at the centre of the cap. At the edge of the polar cap, there is a bright cloud as well as a few fainter extended features that are beyond the cap’s edge. A second, very bright cloud can be seen on the planet’s left edge.
