New images from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope show the ice giant Uranus, its faint rings and several moons.
Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun at a distance of about 2.9 billion km (1.8 billion miles).
It was the first planet found with the aid of a telescope, Uranus was discovered in 1781 by the German-born British astronomer William Herschel, although he originally thought it was either a comet or a star.
Uranus has the third-largest diameter in our Solar System, and is surrounded by 13 faint rings and 27 moons.
One day on Uranus takes about 17 hours. And the planet makes a complete orbit around the Sun in about 84 Earth years.
Uranus is characterized as an ice giant due to the chemical make-up of its interior. Most of its mass is thought to be a hot, dense fluid of ‘icy’ materials — water, methane, and ammonia — above a small rocky core.
Winds blow in its deep blue-green atmosphere mainly east to west at speeds up to 900 km per hour (560 mph), in spite of the small amounts of energy available to drive them.
The atmosphere is almost equal to Neptune’s as the coldest in the Solar System with cloud-top temperatures in the minus 218-degree Celsius (minus 360 degree Fahrenheit) range.
Uranus is the only solar system planet whose equator is nearly at a right angle to its orbit, with a tilt of 97.77 degrees — possibly the result of a collision with an Earth-sized object long ago.
This unique tilt causes the most extreme seasons in the Solar System. For nearly a quarter of each Uranian year, the Sun shines directly over each pole, plunging the other half of the planet into a 21-year-long, dark winter.
“Currently, it is late spring for the northern pole, which is visible here; Uranus’ northern summer will be in 2028,” Webb astronomers explained.
“In contrast, when NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft visited Uranus it was summer at the south pole.”
“The south pole is now on the ‘dark side’ of the planet, out of view and…
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