Uranus is a planet described in textbooks with its bright blue color. However, not many details are known about him. And now, the James Webb Space Telescope presents us with a rare view of this pale blue planet.
NASA scientists already knew that Uranus had some rings. But these rings could only be viewed by 2 cameras before. First imaged by the Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1986, the rings were later imaged with advanced adaptive optics technology at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The new space image came from Webb.
“JWST is a ring machine,” NASA planetary scientist Stefanie Milam said in a video shared by the Science Museum in Boston. “This is one of the first times we’ve seen the rings of Uranus in a very, very long time. They’re really hard to see, and that’s because composed of ice and dust.”
Uranus is made up of “icy” substances such as water, methane and ammonia wrapped around a small rocky core. While it is the only tilted planet in the solar system, its equator is almost at right angles to its orbit, causing it to have extremely violent seasons.
It takes Uranus exactly 84 years to orbit the Sun, which means it spends long periods of time in constant sunlight and total darkness.
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