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Daily Telescope: James Webb zooms in on Uranus

 1 year ago
source link: https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/12/daily-telescope-the-rings-around-uranus-sure-are-shiny/
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Ice Giant —

Daily Telescope: James Webb zooms in on Uranus

Hopefully we revisit this world in our lifetimes.

Eric Berger - 12/19/2023, 1:00 PM

James Webb Space Telescope captures a wide view of Uranus.
Enlarge / James Webb Space Telescope captures a wide view of Uranus.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's December 19, and as we get closer to the year-end holidays your humble space correspondent is starting to get a little stir-crazy. Hence the reason for today's abdominal, I mean abominable, headline.

This amazingly cool image of Uranus comes from the Near-Infrared Camera on the James Webb Space Telescope. This wide-field image shows Uranus with an assortment of background galaxies and 14 of its 27 moons, including Oberon and Titania. We can also see the north polar cap gleaming a bright white, as well as the planet's rather faint (in visible light) inner and outer rings.

I've also included the close-up image of Uranus, which is really quite stunning with all of its various rings.

A close-up view of Uranus.
A close-up view of Uranus.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

You probably already know that this ice giant of a planet is the seventh one in our Solar System from the Sun. Hopefully, we'll be seeing more of this gleaming giant in our lifetimes, with astronomers recently placing a Uranus orbiter as the highest priority science exploration mission for NASA to tackle next.

Source: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

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