CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Neptune and its rings haven’t appeared this good in a long time.
NASA launched new glamour photographs of our photo voltaic system’s outermost planet Wednesday taken by the James Webb Area Telescope. The photographs taken in July present not solely Neptune’s skinny rings, however its faint mud bands, by no means earlier than noticed within the infrared, in addition to seven of its 14 identified moons.
Webb confirmed Jupiter at its greatest in a sequence of recent pictures launched final month.
Launched lower than a yr in the past, the $10 billion Webb is spending most of its time peering a lot deeper into the universe. Astronomers hope to see again to virtually the start of time when the primary stars and galaxies had been forming.
NASA’s Voyager 2 was the primary spacecraft to see Neptune in all its gaseous glory, throughout a 1989 flyby. No different spacecraft have visited the icy, blue planet. So it’s been three a long time since astronomers final noticed these rings with such element and readability, mentioned the Area Science Institute’s Heidi Hammel, a planetary astronomer working with Webb.
Hammel tweeted that she wept when she noticed the rings, yelling and making “my youngsters, my mother, even my cats look.”
Webb is the world’s largest, strongest telescope, working 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth. It rocketed into house final December.
The observatory is in good well being, based on NASA, aside from one merchandise.
NASA reported this week {that a} mechanism on one among Webb’s devices confirmed indicators of elevated friction late final month in one among 4 observing modes. Observations are on maintain on this one explicit observing monitor, as a evaluate board decides on a path ahead.
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