The Webb Space Telescope has taken a stunning image of the planet Uranus, featuring dramatic rings as well as bright features in the planet’s atmosphere.
Saturn might be the planet in our Solar System best known for its spectacular rings, but the icy giant Uranus also has a system of 13 nested rings. Eleven of those rings—nine main rings and two fainter dusty rings—are clearly visible in the latest spectacular image from NASA's Webb Space Telescope. Future images should reveal the remaining two faint outer rings discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2007.
"Uranus has never looked better. Really," NASA tweeted. "Only Voyager 2 and Keck (with adaptive optics) have imaged the planet's faintest rings before, and never as clearly as Webb’s first glimpse at this ice giant, which also highlights bright atmospheric features."
As we've reported previously, the Webb Telescope launched in December 2021 and, after a suspenseful sunshield and mirror deployment over several months, began capturing stunning images. First, there was the deep field image of the Universe, released last July. This was followed by images of exoplanet atmospheres, the Southern Ring Nebula, a cluster of interacting galaxies called Stephan's Quintet, and the Carina Nebula, a star-forming region about 7,600-light-years away. These images reportedly brought astronomers to tears.
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