With Christmas right around the corner, NASA and the ESA are celebrating in a big way. Monday, the space agencies revealed an epic snapshot of Uranus, recently captured by the Webb Space Telescope. In the picture, the gas giant can be seen in its full glory complete with its icy rings.
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According to the space agencies, the image was captured using the Webb Space Telescope NIRCam, or Near-Infrared Camera. In the photo, Uranus’ northern cap can be seen as can nine of the planet’s moons.
“This Webb image also shows 9 of the planet’s 27 moons,” the ESA statement reads. “They are the blue dots that surround the planet’s rings. Clockwise starting at 2 o’clock, they are: Rosalind, Puck, Belinda, Desdemona, Cressida, Bianca, Portia, Juliet, and Perdita. The orbits of these moons share the 98-degree tilt of their parent planet relative to the plane of the solar system.”
It adds, “One day on Uranus is about 17 hours, so the planet’s rotation is relatively quick. This makes it supremely difficult for observatories with a sharp eye like Webb to capture one simple image of the entire planet – storms and other atmospheric features, and the planet’s moons, move visibly within minutes. This image combines several longer and shorter exposures of this dynamic system to correct for those slight changes throughout the observing time.”
Uranus is a target NASA has been after for years, with top researchers saying further exploration of the celestial body should be a top priority.
“We saw this mission as delivering absolutely transformative, breakthrough science because we know so little about these systems. We are sure there are going to be lots of surprises once we get there,” Robin Canup previously said in the report released by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
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