![]() This week we were treated to the telescope’s first glimpses of Mars, while over the summer we saw amazing views of Jupiter. These images of Neptune are just the latest in Webb’s tour of the solar system. “It’s very faint, but it’s in the right location,” she said. Hammel also thinks a glimpse of Hippocampus, an eighth Neptunian moon, is pictured just above the planet. So there is a possibility that there are changes in the surface chemistry over time. “When Voyager 2 flew by, it saw cryovolcanoes erupting. “Triton is a geologically active world,” Hammel said. But future Webb observations should hint at the composition of Triton’s surface and could show changes indicating geological activity. NASA recently declined to send a mission to study Triton, and not much can be gleaned about it from this image. In infrared images, Triton’s frozen nitrogen surface makes it shine like a star, brighter than Neptune itself, because methane dims the planet in infrared light. The brightest is Triton, the planet’s largest moon, which scientists suspect was captured by Neptune’s gravity early in the solar system’s history. Webb images also show seven of Neptune’s 14 moons. “They seem to come and go, a bit like cirrus clouds on Earth.” The Webb telescope’s future observations could uncover how they form and what they are made of. “Nobody really knows what these things are,” said Patrick Irwin, a planetary physicist at Oxford University. It just pops right out.”Īcross the planet there are bright spots believed to be clouds of methane ice, which rise high into the planet’s skies and can persist for days. “I have not seen it in that level of detail since the Voyager encounter in 1989. “The ring system was absolutely mind-boggling to me,” Hammel said. New images could reveal the size and composition of these thin bands, which are probably made of ice and other debris. The Webb telescope will allow astronomers to measure the reflectivity of the rings, offering an unmatched insight into this remote spectacle. Most prominent in the telescope’s view are Neptune’s rings, seen encircling the planet at a slight tilt given its orientation to Earth. “It’s aesthetically fascinating to see those distant galaxies and get a sense for how small the ice giant appears,” said Klaus Pontoppidan, Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute. It took just a few minutes for the telescope to image Neptune close up, and an additional 20 to take a wider view, revealing not just the planet but myriad galaxies behind it stretching into the cosmos. But the Webb’s views of Neptune, taken in July, provide an unprecedented glimpse at the planet in infrared light. Ground-based observatories and the Hubble Space Telescope have taken many images of Neptune in the past three decades.
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