Seen here by @NASAWebb, ice giant Uranus is a dynamic world with rings, moons, storms, extreme seasons, and more. Webb’s sensitivity has even captured the close-in Zeta ring: faint, diffuse, and elusive:

These new images reveal detailed features of Uranus’s seasonal north polar cap, as well as bright storms near and below the southern border of the cap. If humans want to send a spacecraft to visit Uranus up close, it’s necessary to understand how to navigate debris from its rings.

Because of the planet’s extreme 98 degree tilt, its seasons are extreme. For a quarter of its year, the Sun shines on one pole, which means half the planet experiences a dark, 21-Earth year winter.

Context is king! Uranus is a good proxy for many of the types of far-off exoplanets being discovered. Learning more about Uranus may help us understand more about planets of this size in general, including their meteorology, and how they formed. Read more at the link in @NASAWebb’s bio.

Image description: Slide 1 shows an image with a black background. The planet Uranus is a glowing orb near the center surrounded by rings. The planet appears blue with a large, white patch taking up the right half. The patch is whitest at the center, then fades into blue at it expands from right to left. A thin outline of Uranus is also white. Around the planet is a system of nested rings. There are faint orange and off-white smudges, some oval, some circular, that are background galaxies scattered throughout the image. Several bright blue point sources closer to Uranus are the planet’s moons. There is also a bright star at the left of the field, with 8 diffraction spikes. Slide 2 is the same view, but zoomed in. The outermost ring is the brightest while the innermost ring is the faintest. Unlike Saturn’s horizontal rings, the rings of Uranus are vertical, so they appear to surround the planet in an oval shape. There are 9 blueish white dots scattered around the rings.

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

#JWST #Holiday #Uranus #SolarSystem #NASA #space

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18 December 2023