![]() ![]() It's not only the planets of our solar system that JWST is scrutinizing. "We didn't realize that JWST would have this amazing dynamic range and be able to resolve really faint things like the rings of Neptune and the small moons and rings of Jupiter," Rowe-Gurney said. To counteract this, an instrument is required to have the characteristic of "high dynamic range" to take in both the faint and the bright at the same time. Normally, faint details or features around a bright object, such as the dark and tenuous rings around blue Neptune, are difficult to see against the glare of the bright object. "Heidi had not seen the rings since Voyager 2, and I had never seen the rings like this because Voyager was before I was born!" Rowe-Gurney said. "When the JWST's images of Neptune first came out, both Heidi and myself looked at them, and then at each other, and asked, 'are we really looking at Neptune'?" Naomi Rowe-Gurney, an astronomer at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told .Īlthough the Keck Observatory has imaged Neptune's rings, our most impressive view before JWST came from Voyager 2's flyby in 1989. ![]() The James Webb Space Telescope's stunning view of Neptune, with its rings clearly visible. This success means that JWST's images have a clarity to them that were unobtainable by the likes of the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA's retired Spitzer Space Telescope, or larger telescopes on the ground such as those at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, whose vision is blurred by Earth's atmosphere.īut with JWST, individual stars so close together they were once indistinguishable can now be resolved the structures of very distant galaxies are now discernible and even something close by such as the rings of Neptune pop with the most detail seen in decades. The main reason that JWST is performing so well is because of its superlative optics, which are able to achieve their maximum potential resolution for the majority of infrared wavelengths that the telescope observes in. The images are beautiful." The rings of Neptune "It's leaps and bounds better than what we've been able to see before," Susan Mullally, JWST's deputy project scientist from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Maryland, which operates the observatory, told, adding that she is "blown away by the imagery, honestly. "It's delivering at least as well, and better in a lot of circumstances, than what we were expecting."Īnd if it exceeds its own targets, it definitely surpasses those of its predecessors. "It's amazing," Steve Longmore, an astrophysicist at Liverpool John Moores University in the U.K., told. The James Webb Space Telescope launched atop an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana on Dec. ![]()
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