ABSOLUTELY REMARKABLE, JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE CAPTURES STUNNING NEW IMAGE OF NEPTUNE AND ITS RINGS

NASA announced Wednesday that the James Webb Space Telescope has turned its gaze away from the deep universe and toward our own Solar System, capturing an image of a luminous Neptune and its delicate, dusty rings in detail not seen in decades.

The last time astronomers had such a clear view of the planet farthest from the sun was in 1989, when NASA's Voyager 2 became the first and only space probe to pass by the ice giant for a few hours.

According to Mark McCaughrean, a senior advisor for science and exploration at the European Space Agency, Webb's unprecedented infrared imaging capabilities have now provided a new glimpse into Neptune's atmosphere.

According to McCaughrean, who has worked on the Webb project for more than 20 years, the telescope "takes all that glare and background away" so that "we can start to tease out the atmospheric composition" of the planet.

Neptune appears deep blue in previous Hubble Space Telescope images due to methane in its atmosphere. The planet appears greyish white in near-infrared wavelengths captured by Webb's primary imager NIRCam, with icy clouds streaking the surface.

"The rings are more reflective in the infrared, so they're much easier to see," McCaughrean explained.

According to NASA, the image also shows a "interesting brightness" near the top of Neptune. Astronomers have yet to see the planet's north pole because it is tilted away from Earth and takes 164 years to orbit the Sun.

Webb also discovered seven of Neptune's fourteen known moons.

In a zoomed-out image, what appears to be a very bright spiky star is actually Triton, Neptune's strange, massive moon haloed with Webb's famed diffraction spikes.

Triton, which is larger than Pluto, appears brighter than Neptune due to its ice cover, which reflects light. Meanwhile, Neptune "absorbs most of the light falling on it," according to McCaughrean.

Because Triton orbits Neptune in the wrong direction, it is thought to be an object from the nearby Kuiper belt that was captured in the planet's orbit.

"So it's pretty cool to go look at," McCaughrean said.

As astronomers search the universe for other planets like ours, they've discovered that ice giants like Neptune and Uranus are the most common in the Milky Way.

"By looking at these in great detail, we can key into our observations of other ice giants," McCaughrean explained.

Webb, which has been in operation since July, is the most powerful space telescope ever built and has already produced a flood of previously unheard-of data. Scientists believe it will usher in a new era of discovery.

Webb's observations of Neptune and Triton will be the basis for future research.

"Five years ago, we couldn't have imagined the kind of astronomy we're seeing now," McCaughrean said.

"Of course, we knew it would do this; we built it for this purpose; it is exactly the machine we designed," he explained. "However, to suddenly start seeing things in these longer wavelengths that were previously impossible... it's just absolutely remarkable."

The world's newest and largest space telescope captured an extremely detailed image of thousands of never-before-seen young stars in a region known as the Tarantula Nebula earlier this month.

This summer, the telescope captured stunning images of Jupiter as well as the clearest view yet of the Cartwheel Galaxy.

Webb, unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, is designed to study longer-wavelength infrared radiation, allowing it to capture light from the dawn of the universe that has been stretched out by the expansion of space itself over the past 13.8 billion years.

The European Space Agency released a new photo last month of the heart of Messier 74, which is located 32 million light years away in the Pisces constellation, in a view that combines the Hubble and Webb telescopes.

Source : CBS News