James Webb captures a unique view of Uranus’s ring system

By Georgina Torbet December 18, 2023

A festive new image from the James Webb Space Telescope has been released, showing the stunning rings of Uranus. Although these rings are hard to see in the visible light wavelength — which is why you probably don’t think of Uranus as having rings like Saturn — these rings shine out brightly in the infrared wavelength that Webb’s instruments operate in.

The image was taken using Webb’s NIRCam instrument and shows the rings in even more detail than a previous Webb image of Uranus, which was released earlier this year.

This image of Uranus from NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows the planet and its rings in new clarity. The Webb image exquisitely captures Uranus’s seasonal north polar cap, including the bright, white, inner cap and the dark lane in the bottom of the polar cap. Uranus’ dim inner and outer rings are also visible in this image, including the elusive Zeta ring—the extremely faint and diffuse ring closest to the planet. — This image of Uranus from NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows the planet and its rings in new clarity. The Webb image exquisitely captures Uranus’s seasonal north polar cap, including the bright, white, inner cap and the dark lane in the bottom of the polar cap. Uranus’ dim inner and outer rings are also visible in this image, including the elusive Zeta ring—the extremely faint and diffuse ring closest to the planet. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

This new view of Uranus adds an additional wavelength to the previous image, which helps show even more of the rings, including the rarely-seen Zeta ring, which is a very faint ring of material close to the planet’s surface — only a few hundred kilometers above the clouds. The image also shows several of the planet’s 27 moons, some of which sit outside the rings and some even within the rings.

The image also reveals features on the planet’s surface, particularly its polar ice cap. The dot of bright white is the center of the ice cap, while the darker area around this is the bottom of the cap. We get this unusual view of Uranus with its pole almost toward us because of the planet’s strange rotation pattern. It is extremely titled, with the planet almost entirely tipped over onto its side relative to its orbit, which means that during the long summer, the sun shines almost continuously onto its north pole.

This summer season in the northern hemisphere lasts an incredible 21 years and is thought to affect the planet’s weather as one pole experiences so much sun while the other is in darkness. Uranus is host to dramatic storms, which are also visible in the image as bright dots along the bottom edge of the polar ice cap.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Tech News

Georgina Torbet

Space Writer

Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…

Space

James Webb photographs two potential exoplanets orbiting white dwarfs

Illustration of a cloudy exoplanet and a disk of debris orbiting a white dwarf star.

Even though scientists have now discovered more than 5,000 exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system, it's a rare thing that any telescope can take an image of one of these planets. That's because they are so small and dim compared to the stars that they orbit around that it's easier to detect their presence based on their effects on the star rather than them being detected directly.

However, thanks to its exceptional sensitivity, the James Webb Space Telescope was recently able to image two potential exoplanets orbiting around small, cold cores of dead stars called white dwarfs directly.

Space

See 19 gorgeous face-on spiral galaxies in new James Webb data

This collection of 19 face-on spiral galaxies from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope in near- and mid-infrared light is at once overwhelming and awe-inspiring. Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) captured millions of stars in these images. Older stars appear blue here, and are clustered at the galaxies’ cores. The telescope’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) observations highlight glowing dust, showing where it exists around and between stars – appearing in shades of red and orange. Stars that haven’t yet fully formed and are encased in gas and dust appear bright red.

A stunning new set of images from the James Webb Space Telescope illustrates the variety of forms that exist within spiral galaxies like our Milky Way. The collection of 19 images shows a selection of spiral galaxies seen from face-on in the near-infrared and mid-infrared wavelengths, highlighting the similarities and differences that exist across these majestic celestial objects.

“Webb’s new images are extraordinary,” said Janice Lee of the Space Telescope Science Institute, in a statement. “They’re mind-blowing even for researchers who have studied these same galaxies for decades. Bubbles and filaments are resolved down to the smallest scales ever observed, and tell a story about the star formation cycle.”

Space

James Webb snaps a stunning stellar nursery in a nearby satellite galaxy

This image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope features an H II region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. This nebula, known as N79, is a region of interstellar atomic hydrogen that is ionised, captured here by Webb’s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI).

A stunning new image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows a star-forming region in the nearby galaxy of the Large Magellanic Cloud. Our Milky Way galaxy has a number of satellite galaxies, which are smaller galaxies gravitationally bound to our own, the largest of which is the Large Magellanic Cloud or LMC.

The image was taken using Webb's Mid-Infrared Instrument or MIRI, which looks at slightly longer wavelengths than its other three instruments which operate in the near-infrared. That means MIRI is well suited to study things like the warm dust and gas found in this region in a nebula called N79.