![]() When University of Arizona astronomer Marcia Rieke got a chance to look at the new Neptune views, she says, “as usual, I'm blown away by what we see.” Rieke, who is currently principal investigator of JWST’s main imager, called the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), recalls trying to view Neptune’s rings years ago using a ground-based telescope on Kitt Peak in Arizona. These show up as fuzzy particles in between the brighter, ice-dominated rings, says Mark McCaughrean, senior science adviser at the European Space Agency (ESA) and a member of the JWST Science Working Group. “For me, looking at JWST’s new Neptune image is like catching up with a friend you haven’t seen in ten-plus years-and they look GREAT ,” wrote Jane Rigby, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who serves as the agency’s JWST operations project scientist, in an e-mail to Scientific American.Īfter a nail-biting launch on Christmas Day in 2021, the telescope began full operation this July and has since splashed the news with jaw-dropping images of nebulae and discoveries of ancient galaxies that could “ break cosmology.” But JWST’s keen infrared eyes are opening new vistas closer to home as well when they are turned to our solar system’s retinue of worlds.įor instance, the telescope’s view of Neptune shows the planet’s tenuous dust bands in unprecedented clarity. This is the sharpest image of the planet’s rings obtained since the Voyager 2 flyby in 1989, and it reveals a plethora of never-before-seen details. As if dainty, iridescent fairies are racing around a cosmic track, Neptune’s rings sparkle in a stunning new view captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the most powerful off-world observatory yet built.
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