This is so gorgeous. I didn't even know about the existence of rings on Uranus; it is so satisfying to be able to discern features like storms on such a far away planet!
This is so gorgeous. I didn't even know about the existence of rings on Uranus; it is so satisfying to be able to discern features like storms on such a far away planet!
As someone who does not follow space stuff, I kinda expected more / higher resolution.
This is Uranus from earth: https://skyandtelescope.org/observing/interactive-sky-watchi...
Part of the trouble is that it’s really far away.
The photos on that page were taken with 8- and 14-inch telescopes. I expected a 6.5-meter one to have a more detailed image.
Keck has a 10-meter aperture and its image of Uranus looks like this: https://keckobservatory.org/keck_pictures_of_uranus_show_bes...
Bigger telescopes are mostly about capturing more photons to detect fainter objects. They don't really give you better resolution in most cases. Technically, a bigger telescope can give better resolution, but from the ground, the limit is usually atmospheric seeing. From orbit, it will be down to the quality of the optics, the resolution of the detector, and the precision of the tracking.
This is very much a basic misunderstanding with telescopes. Most people expect magnification. The amount of photons absorbed is something of a very esoteric concept to the uninitiated.
Signal to noise ratio.
Webb is optimized for different things.
https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/12/01/webb-space-telescope-ke...
Though the quality of the JWST and Keck images may look about the same to the untrained eye, de Pater noted that JWST has instruments that can measure aspects of Titan’s atmosphere that Keck cannot, complementing one another. In particular, JWST’s infrared spectroscopic capability allows it to pinpoint the altitudes of clouds and hazes with much better accuracy.
“By using spectrometers on JWST together with the optical image quality with Keck, we get a really complete picture of Titan,” she said, such as the heights of clouds, the atmosphere’s optical thickness, and the elevation of haze in the atmosphere.
In particular, at wavelengths where Earth’s atmosphere is opaque — that is, Titan cannot be seen from any Earth-based telescope — JWST can observe and provide information on the lower atmosphere and surface.
At least you can even get that. Pluto is just a dot. And to properly image Pluto, you basically need to image the area Pluto is expected over several nights, and then stack the images to see which dot is moving.
That's amazing! Through my 8in scope Uranus looks like a blue dot — too big to be a star, but paltry even in comparison to Mars.
Admittedly I've been having trouble reliably locating it. Currently it's near the middle of a line between the Pleiades and Jupiter. From where I am there are no naked eye visible stars in the region to help walk the scope in.
I think we got supremely spoiled by Cassini.
And Voyager 2. (not in NIR, though)
A modern probe to the ice giants is long overdue. Plenty of missions were proposed over decades, but none actually made it.
Comparing a mission to orbit and stay on mission is really unfair to one that is only whizzing by the planet. The ice bodies need their own versions of Cassini instead of just being a road side stop for souvenirs on the way to the actual destination. The plants are not the world's largest ball of twine or some other cash grab of an attraction. They should be the destination.
You’ll have to play up the hydrocarbons to get the US to fund such a destination.
It's a good thing the US is no longer the only space agency sending out probes into the solar system. Sadly, the reach of the US does extend into the other agencies in a pretty influential way though
Some high def drone footage would have fit the bill for you? (FYI in case it wasn't recognized /S as your comment seems a bit silly to me in that you are dissapointed that we have a decent quality image of something ~4 LH away).
The expectations humans have on new technology ceases to amaze me especially when something is unbelievably impressive and people are like, that's all?
Nope but Uranus is a mere 2.5h light hours away and the resolution appears to be roughly the same than looking at the moon with naked eyes. So it's not totally unreasonable to have expected a slightly better image for the best telescope we have.
This being said, that image is still better than anything else we have seen from other telescopes
Uranus is roughly 3 light hours away.
Distance from earth to Uranus varies between 2.6-3.2e12 m from Earth [1]. Speed of light in vacuum is 3e8 m/s, so calling the distance 3e12 to make the math easy, it's 1e4s (2 and 7/9 hours) for light to travel between earth and Uranus.
[1] https://www.space.com/18709-uranus-distance.html#:~:text=How....
yes, typo... thanks and fixed! The point was, it's not all that far away when compared to even the next star 4.3 light years away (2.5h vs 4.5years)
that comparison should make you appreciate the unfathomable distances between even the most local astronomical objects, not underestimate it.
The distance between continents is hard enough for the human brain to comprehend, and imagine the difficulty in trying to caputure an image with a telephoto lens of some resolvable feature in japan, from europe or america (forgetting the shape of the Earth's surface for a moment).
Of course ever graceful, nature offers us a compromise. Most astronomical object (galaxies, nebula) are very big, and very very far away. It is not resolution that makes it difficult to see them (since they span an appreciable arc-width of our sky, e.g. search pictures of the angular width of andromeda galaxy or the orion nebula compared to the moon), but how faint they are.
The photons they emit are travelling across swathes of the observable universe. They travel across scales where the presence of galaxy clusters warp the geometry of space-time, a turbulant voyage for these light rays. They travel across distances where space itself inflates like a balloon, the expanding universe sapping energy from them until they arrive in our detectors or eyeballs redshifted beyond recognision. This is why observatories and satellite-telescopes need to place a huge emphasis on scaling up mirror size to scoop up all the photons they possibly can, as opposed to strictly focusing on resolution - as an earthbound photographer might naively expect.
Now consider the nature of planets, they are not diffuse clouds of molecules or dust lanes spanning galactic widths, they are tightly bound, tangible, physical objects. Now they might be our neighbours, trapped in the same spiral around the sun's gravitational well, but that doesn't mean they're "close" in any sense that the human mind could every really fathom. If we want to resolve atmospheric or geographic (is that even the right word for other planets?) features, we need to be able to achieve precise resolutions beyond what is normally required for other types of astronomical observation. Indeed, if you've every taken a class on optics or astronomy, you might be suprised how quickly fundamental limits of resolution that arise from lights wave-like behaviour - like airy disks - begin to veil that which we wish to observe, when playing around with frequiencies and aperture widths on a "humman" scale.
I'll be honest, it looks fake. I don't think it is fake and I'm not trying to imply that it is. The resolution is low and high at the same time. The other zoomed out pictures are better for me personally because it gives me a little more context seeing I know nothing about space.
Real or not?
Anyone else get frustrated with the accepted practice in astronomy to (a) alter colors and (b) show the non-visible light spectrum.
Because it results in radically different images from what we can see with our human eye and its hugely misleading to the general public.
NASA has a whole article on this subject; it’s a great read.
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/science/science-behi...
That's how photos are in general. No camera captures exactly what the eye sees.
Is setting an ISO radically changing things?
Is setting an exposure time radically changing things?
Is having an RGGB bayer pattern radically changing things?
Is having only a 91% quantum efficiency sensor radically changing things?
The questions keep going, I could ask about hot pixel removal, denoise, contrast and saturation, wavelength response curves.
Cameras aren't eyes.
Photos aren't biochemical reactions.
No, there's a huge difference.
Regular consumer cameras are designed to be as close as possible to what the human eye sees. They're very obviously chosen to be responsive to R, G and B. Not infrared, yellow and UVB.
An image like this is not meant to try to match the human eye.
To try to say all cameras don't match the eyes is a false equivalence. Some are purposefully trying to match, some are purposefully trying not to (like this one).
I'd argue if isn't a false equivalence. Every time someone drags that contrast and saturation slider up they're doing something that's no different than assigning RGB to sulfur II, hydrogen alpha, and oxygen III.
It's all false color to make something look good.
That's photo editing, not camera settings like ISO or shutter speed.
Cameras are still designed to try to be able to match what the human eye perceives, regardless of what you edit afterwards.
An infrared telescope is not. Totally and utterly different. They're not the same.
I prefer to be able to see things instead of black
I sure do. But at the same time, isn't this a near infrared camera, so outside the visible spectrum?
Considering it's from NIRCam I don't think there's reason to expect a "real" visible light image... that's not what this sensor does.
NIRcam studies objects in the near infrared, so invisible to human eyes. This is true of most of JWSTs instruments; everything you see is false color.
With my eyes, when I look at a light source I see light refractions (rays) coming from the source that people without astigmatism do not see.
I do get what you are trying to say here and I know I'm taking your argument to the extreme, but... bear in mind that even 2 randomly selected humans would see different things looking at the same object.
Even though no human can see the light that JWST is capturing doesn't mean it is not there. The colors are false indeed (compared to what a typical human would perceive as color), but then we also would get absolutely no pictures from JWST to look at.
Because it results in radically different images from what we can see with our human eye...
Good! That's why we have spent $10B on it!
JWST is an infrared telescope. The human eye does not see infrared.
Are the rings only that prominent because of infrared? Would they look like that in visible light if you were close enough? Those look like they could compete with Saturn.
Nothing like this.
Voyager saw this: https://www.flickr.com/photos/132160802@N06/40079347843
Even that's better than we'd see with our eyes:
The rings here are significantly fainter relative to Uranus than pictured here; the charcoal black rings would be near the limits of naked eye visibility to a human observer.
I love webb, but there is something hauntingly beautiful about these photographs from voyager / juno and other flyby missions. It _feels_ close, yet alarmingly far.
The flyby photos are cool but it’s just so much more useful to have a telescope at a controlled location able to focus on any point for any amount of time. I do hope we keep doing flybys or autonomous exploration of the planets with a video feed
Sure sure. Nobody is going to make mission decisions based on my artistic interpretation of the results.
Aside: I think the most useful instrument for NASA's mission at the moment is a boolean "Life/no-life" indicator on each planet, moon, asteroid, etc. Not very pretty.
Exactly! I would rather see things the way my eyes would see them up close. The Webb photo seems unrealistic and photoshopped (even though it isn't).
Uranus' orbit is 20x further from the Sun than Earth, which means it only gets 0.25% as much sunlight.
Not sure what exactly that means for human eyesight, but it's probably less spectacular out there than we'd hope.
Human vision is strongly exponential in terms of brightness sensitivity. In photography we talk about “stops” which are powers of two of light intensity.
Consumer digital cameras around 2005 could see maybe 9 stops for a single exposure. Now they can do maybe 10-14 (which means they’re ~30x more capable of a range of light values).
Human vision can handle adapting to a much wider range because we don’t see with a single exposure. The iris adjusts, we saccade around the scene collecting data and mentally aggregating it. A good approximation is the iPhone’s panorama mode. It’s really recording video and adapting the dynamic range window as you pan, so the sun tends not to blown out the rest of the image.
The main point I want to make is that outdoor sunlight on earth is indeed a million times more intense in terms of lux, lumens, candelas, or watts, than interior living (say lit by a nightlight or candle). This works out to 20 stops.
- 100,000 lux outdoors on earth
- 0.1 lux finding your seat in a theater
So we can see already when the light is 0.0001% the power of “Earth, noon”. We could see Uranus.
Sunlight on earth is extremely intense! You feel it direct on your skin like being 2 feet from a fire. It damages your cells. It evaporates the sea and propels hurricanes. I’d we hadn’t evolved to live with it, we’d find it quite intolerable.
For comparison, daytime on Earth is about 100,000 lux while a typical moonlit night is 0.1 lux[0].
Uranus gets 350 lux[1], which is similar to the light level at sunrise on Earth.
So quite dim but not dark.
[0] https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/58/1/1.31/2938119
You'd be surprised by the dynamic range of the human eye. I happen to have my camera on my desk, so I used it to take a couple measurements just now. It's a bright, sunny day.
Pointed out the window[1]: 1/2000th
The interior of my office[2]: 1/30th
My office feels brightly lit to me, but the ambient light level is only about 1-2% of what it is outdoors. I estimate that 0.25% is roughly how bright it is indoors on an overcast day or outdoors at twilight on a clear day. It's dim, but people with unimpaired vision have no trouble seeing in that light level and the planet would still look spectacular.
1. Grass and trees with no sky in frame.
2. Shades open, light grey walls mostly. Same ISO and aperture.
Does James Webb do video?
No, but it does run Javascript: https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/18/23206110/james-webb-space...
The first contact from aliens will surely be them exploiting this with an XSS attack to set window.location to a Rick Roll video.
Unreal; you mean I could actually potentially write software for a space telescope?
"the language the scripts are written in is called Nombas ScriptEase 5.00e."
https://brent-noorda.com/nombas/us/index.htm
"Nombas doesn't exist any more. All the good stuff was sold to Openwave, then sold to someone else, then sold to someone else, then I lost track."
Of a planet, I guess in theory it could take a 15fps video, I dont think the sensor was designed for that.
Most likely not. Other than maybe stitch several images together in post-processing. Although not sure what use video would be on JWST. It's mostly staring at distant objects where motion wouldn't be perceivable. Unless it's taking images of a planet with several orbiting moons. Even then, it would just be would a handful of frames stitched together here on earth.
Only if you tip $20 or more.
No, these are targets that are planned months in advance and at relatively long exposures in order to collect enough photons to, well, actually see the thing.
You certainly wouldn't get 60FPS, that's for sure.
I doubt it — would anything move fast enough to be usefully recorded?
I wish we were capable of sending manned missions to the gas giants. Uranus and Neptune are such mysterious and beautiful worlds, I'd really like to see them up close with my own eyes, however dim such an image would be.
Maybe if we make it past the ecosystem collapse, one day people will take the Grand Tour in person. (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune)
Agree. The more I see of Uranus the more mysterious it seems. Like it’s got to be much more complex than we imagine.
"Like it’s got to be much more complex than we imagine."
That is, how it usually is ..
The problem that most people aren't even aware of is that Jupiter(and maybe others? I'm actually not sure) is throwing a massive amount of radiation around - getting anywhere close to it would kill any human very quickly. It's a huge factor in any proposed missions to its moons - like, it would be awesome to explore Europa, the concept is fascinating, but its surface is deadly due to radiation coming from Jupiter.
Yeah, the radiation was partly why I wrote "capable of sending people". You'd probably need quite a few metres of water ice surrounding your livable space if you don't want to get fried.
Which makes me wonder: if a ship was covered in, say, 10 metres of ice, would the top layer get irradiated and thus need to be replaced every so often? I wonder if it was left exposed to space, would the water ice sublimate away? Then "all" you'd need to do is replace the top layer.
Humans safe behind ice while robots do the work isn't quite as romantic as The Expanse but it'll get the job done!
It wouldn't be too dim, your eyes have remarkable dynamic range. Brightness is experienced more like sound, with sensory capacity of many orders of magnitude, than a physical scalar sense like weight or distance.
Wikipedia says [1] the solar radiation on Uranus is 3.4-4 W/m^2. Imagine lighting up a square meter of wall with a 3W pocket inspection light, or a mood-lit room with just a few 8W bulbs. Reading might be a little bit of a strain after a while, but I think your eyes would quickly adjust.
When New Horizons was going past Pluto, Nasa put out the #PlutoTime website [2]. Pluto is about 30 AU from Earth, Uranus is about 20 AU out, so at a particular moment around twilight - when it's bright enough to walk around without artificial lighting and to take a photo - it will be as bright as it is on Uranus. The widget is dead, but it's still accessible through archive.org. Unfortunately, it's no longer accurate, it seems to be linked to the time and date when the site was archived. I'm neither a web dev nor an astronomer, but I exported the JS and it seems to provide reasonable results:
https://jsfiddle.net/9btumsj6/
Anyone have an idea of what solar_angle should be to simulate Uranus or Neptune? Apparently, when the sun is -1.5 degrees below the horizon here, that's about right for Pluto illumination. Just reducing the angle by three from -1.5 to -0.5 changes the time by about 6 minutes of twilight...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#Intensity_in_the_Sola...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20150827083531/http://solarsyste...
Thank you for a very interesting comment, I appreciate the work you put into it.
I recall from the New Horizons media blitz that noon on Pluto is roughly the brightness of dawn or dusk, so the image of these planets should be bright enough!
The Grand Tour is a hard one, and was only possible due to a convenient alignment of the planets that does not happen frequently. For example, if Jupiter is on one side of its orbit while Saturn is on the 180° opposite point of its orbit, that's a really long way to go between destinations on the tour. I think going on a Grand Tour where you had to skip one of the planets due to a misalignment would be like going to Disneyland and never seeing Mickey. Even if you saw all of the other characters, it would still feel like you missed something.
I wouldn't mind taking a closer look, but being inside of a gas giant seems questionable given the pressure. I've heard astronomers compare the atmosphere of some gas giants to the density of a 7-11 slurpee... and that sounds terrifying.
Everytime I see these pictures I feel a little despaired... Are there people here who believe one day we could travel fast enough to go there ?
Of course. Its in our solar system. Although it is very far away, if we get on to it, we can plan it at a huge cost.
Humans won't be landing on the surface of the Gas Giants anytime soon due to their hostile atmospheres, but many of their moons are prime candidates for human settlement!
NASA is planning a robotic mission launching in the 2030s, arriving in the 2040s.
Humans? There are probably better destinations in the solar system that we’d go during the period between it becoming technically/economically feasible, and humans being replaced with robots.
I'm confused... What's causing your despair? Do you think we'll never be able to visit Uranus in human-compatible travel times? Assuming we (organic humans) survive this century, I'd consider it almost certain we'll find a way to make travel within the solar system a normal thing eventually.
Absolutely, but we'll need to develop some future technology that allows multiple days of constant acceleration.
At 2G constant accel/decel, it'll take ~8.5 days to get to Uranus, reaching a top speed of 2.3% of light speed (14.2 million m/s), and experiencing 17 seconds of time dilation (https://chat.openai.com/share/b93297e1-b089-46d1-8314-a2235b...). :)
I'm sure people said the same thing about being able to travel to the other side of the world in less than a day, when it used to take years. Yet here we are.
Go there and do what?
Neat! Voyager 2 took a high resolution true color photo[1] of Uranus in 1986, as well, but you can't make out the rings.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranus#/media/File:Uranus_as_s...
Your emphasis on true color is worth underscoring. I think it's a bit unfair to publish a photo like this one from James Webb without providing a few less-stylized edits for comparison, and an explanation of what the colorization process entailed. Obviously as an infrared photo there isn't going to be any edit that gives us a great idea of what it would look like to the eye, but it seems like they chose the most wondrous-looking settings in photoshop on this one, as opposed to the truest.
Truest is a problematic word in this stuff, JW as you say doesn't even see the visible spectrum, and I don't find it helpful to ask for the least-inspiring fiction of those available.
Arguably there is no "true" translation; the point of JW capturing what spectrum it does, is to reveal features obscured or invisible in the visible spectrum.
Over the years I have come to reject the "what would the plain eye see" position as not helpful. We're tool-using monkeys and the phones we carry around now run supercomputers to quietly show not what the plain eye sees but something which works better for our needs—to be both evocative and information-rich.
If and when we ever get a chance to gaze on Uranus ourselves, I myself imagine and hope it will be courtesy of some transformation of our embodiment that will look an order richer than even the most stylized images we have today, because they will be broad spectrum and be overlayed with semantic content rendered as perceptual to aid our executive functions... all of which will probably be running on some computation substrate other than our monkey mammal selves. Space isn't kind to those.
FWIW, according to the specs the JWST starts at 600nm, which means it does at least cover the red visible spectrum. (R from RGB being 600-700nm per my understanding)
It seems a shame they didn't include the 400-600nm range as well.
True images are always artistic estimations, Both visualizations are misleading for normal people but one has scientific merit and one is just for nice wallpapers.
Can you elaborate: why are the rings not visible on that image? Is it because they are outside the frame, or too faint, or don't appear in the visible spectrum? Something else?
The rings are extremely dark, reflecting only 2% of incoming light. The James Webb image is an infrared photo, and doesn't show what the planet looks like.
...doesn't show what the planet looks like to us.
Uranus is on its side. The moons orbits are on their side too, and do they also rotate on their sides, all with respect to the solar plane? The dance of the Sun in the sky must be very exotic for the moon folk of that mini system.
I think that due to angular momentum, they do all rotate aligned to the same plane.
The ring plane is aligned with the solar planetary plane?
No, not really. "aligned" would suggest some kind of connection. It is very likely a complete accident. Literally.
It most likely that at some point Uranus was hit by a planet and the collision changed the spin axis. Must have been pretty early for everything else to be aligned with the new axis.
Sorry, I meant more something like "coincident" or "parallel".
Probably a stupid question but how'd it get this vantage? Isn't JWST at a LaGrange point from Earth? Wouldn't that be on the same plane? I suppose it must not be in order to have taken this image.
Maybe you're missing the 'Uranus axis of rotation is super tilted' part? Its equatorial plane (along with its rings) is not at all 'parallel' to the ecliptic, that's what the toplevel comment is pointing out.
The large moons have zero inclination with respect to Uranus’ equator but the smaller irregular moons are all over the place. Wikipedia has this nice graphic showing orbital distance (x), eccentricity (x error bar) orbit inclination (y), and moon size:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/TheIrreg...
The only thing missing from the graphic is each moons axial tilt with respect to either its orbit or the rest of the solar system.
I rather prefer the wide shot that the featured image was cropped from: https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01HHFQ09W5PKSA6EBKJMW51R5M.png
Image Description from Nasa site:
This image of Uranus from NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows the planet and its rings in new clarity. The planet’s seasonal north polar cap gleams in a bright white, and Webb’s exquisite sensitivity resolves Uranus’ dim inner and outer rings, including the Zeta ring—the extremely faint and diffuse ring closest to the planet.
This Webb image also shows 14 of the planet’s 27 moons: Oberon, Titania, Umbriel, Juliet, Perdita, Rosalind, Puck, Belinda, Desdemona, Cressida, Ariel, Miranda, Bianca, and Portia.
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.
Webb’s extreme sensitivity also picks up a smattering of background galaxies—most appear as orange smudges, and there are two larger, fuzzy white galaxies to the right of the planet in this field of view.
I just love almost all the dots, photobombing, are detailed galaxies instead of just stars
It is amazing. I really wish I could see that level of detail with my own eyes. Queue Battlestar Galactica rant (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPnx3zO3SDc).
If you find yourself out in the Mojave desert camping in a new moon, you'll swear you can see stuff like this. It's almost unbelievable.
[delayed]
I'm sure it's a challenge at some level but I like seeing the JWST 'fingerprint' on images.
That is magnificent. Thanks for sharing.
My inner middle-schooler is giggling over the headline.
I couldn't help it either. Astronomy is just going to be forever plagued by this name.
It's a problem just in English, because for some reason that I really don't understand, in English it's pronunced like (ur)anus, instead of pronuncing it like the name of the Greek god it's named after - ooranos(Uranos).
and if you shift the stress to the first syllable, it comes out as Urinous. Ya can't win.
I can't believe I had to scroll this much. Thank you!
really wishing HN had a LLM powered 'Sort by humor' feature right now
Gotta say I chuckled when I read the headline.
...and when I saw the headline above the photo.
Journalists have been waiting their whole life to publish those headlines :-p
+ comments haha. i am so sorry.
u so fat that: "Uranus' orbit is 20x further from the Sun than Earth, which means it only gets 0.25% as much sunlight."
wish i was an astronomer :').
I'm going to enjoy sharing this headline with my family and I expect maximum eye rolls.
life is too short not to
astrology ignorant here.
are those light rings portrayed this way because its debris orbiting at a very long exposure ?
Astrology? I think you mean Astronomy.
Astrology Ignorance is a Good Thing! Cultivate it.
*astronomy
No; the rings are made up of tiny particles, so they appear contiguous. You'd have to get very close to see the individual chunks.
Given how much is still unknown about the planets in our own solar system, I wonder why we haven't prioritized putting a satellite or two around each one, starting with Mars. We can obviously get the satellites there, and I'd imagine it's a lot easier to get better longitudinal data by watching it directly over time. Even something as simple as our current weather satellites over Earth would provide a ton of useful data.
We have? There have been piles of orbiter missions over the years to all the inner planets as well as to Saturn and Jupiter.
It’s exceptionally hard to financially justify exploration, when so many other problems could see substantial improvement given the costs required.
When will I stop giggling at headlines mentioning "Uranus"? Maybe never?
Gorgeous images tho, everything seemed perfectly angled for a glamour shot.
I hope we don't stop giggling. Lighthearted humor should be kept alive! It was fun even in uni.
To me it's kind of insane (again) that in the full picture behind Uranus there are several casual galaxies floating through space (https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2023/150/01H...).
Probably capturing a bunch of civilizations with their own Caesars, revolutions and a variety of delicious cocktails in the background.
And their own JWST And HN writing that comment. Millions of them.
Underrated submission title
9 year old me finally gets to cross this off the bucket list.
It's gonna be super useful to train on Uranus data to help with understanding exoplanets, since many will be like Uranus.
Just curious: how would that help exactly? So far we can get two relevant data points for exoplanets: mass or if we're lucky size and maybe spectra. That's one Uranus size, one Uranus mass and the atmospheric spectrum of Uranus. Since neither of those is variable (at least on human timescales) I don't see how a training dataset with one entry would help.
Finding Uranus analogues would also be particularly challenging since we cannot expect to ever confirm one using telescopes, given that a Uranus orbit takes ~84 years and you need to observe at least 3 full orbits to confirm a planet.
Any Uranus-sized object orbiting significantly closer to its host star (i.e. able to be confirmed within a human lifetime) would likely differ from Uranus as it would either receive substantially more energy from its host star or have a completely different host star altogether (e.g. a red dwarf), which may have an impact on its composition.
Gorgeous...
But I've always been curious, I've heard it both ways: If I were on a space ship exploring the outer planets looking out a regular-ass glass window, would the rings of Jupiter, Neptune, and Uranus even be visible to the naked eye? I mean I know Saturn's rings are incredibly apparent, but for the other 3 gas giants?
For example, many of the Voyager pics of Uranus don't have the rings visible, and the ones that do are colored oddly and make me assume that this is some kind of massive false-color high-gain thing to make them visible.
I don't believe so. Many things you see in space like nebula, would not really be visible to the naked eye even if you were in the middle of them. Don't let the fact that primate eyes can't see it detract from the grandeur though.
Even the planet itself would be dim, at 20AU from the sun, it would be 400x dimmer than the earth, close to the brightness of dawn/dusk on earth.
The jokes just write themselves...
2620 can't come soon enough [1].
Ah, the gas giants.
Utanus (and Neptune) are more accurately ice giants than gas giants.
I think you can barely see the outer ring (R/2003 U 1) in the bottom left.
I really hope we get a better look at the moons of Neptune and Uranus sooner than later. They seem to have lots of interesting history.
If you're middle-aged, you might get a chance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranus_Orbiter_and_Probe
It's the highest priority probe, but wouldn't get there until the 2050s. To borrow a thought from idlewords, we could be sending cameras to every large object in the solar system for way less than it's costing to develop the current Moon program ($93 billion through 2025).
This is so beautiful, I’m sure this will be one of those shots that will inspire an interest in astronomy for generations to come.
That looks like its straight out of an 1980s scifi book cover.
With its exquisite sensitivity, Webb captured Uranus’ dim inner and outer rings, including the elusive Zeta ring – the extremely faint and diffuse ring closest to the planet
This is pretty amazing. I knew Uranus required sensitive instruments, but didn't realize the payoff would be so rewarding.
I have to say, with all the discussion about how magnificent the JWST was going to be, and now it is, I expected a better picture. It puts into perspective just how far away Uranus is, which is hard to wrap my mind around...
I never thought Uranus would be like this. Wonderful!
Tee hee.
Were there Klingons?
lmao
Very Cool, it looks like a pearl floating in space
_-_JPEG_converted.jpg){kind=link}
My 9 year old daughter told me last week that Uranus had rings, and I told her I really didn't think so, are you thinking of Saturn? And she said nope, they both do. What a weird bit of knowledge to get wrong, even at 9, so I looked it up. She was delighted to have taught me something.
That’s crazy to hear. To me, after Saturn, Uranus is the most famous planet with rings because it’s vertical instead of horizontal. That’s the defining feature of Uranus.
The defining feature of Uranus is that its axis of rotation is at almost right angle to the axis of rotation of Solar system.
The rings just conform to that axis of rotation along with moons and such.
Also, rings are thought to be relatively recent feature of Uranus (on the order of hundreds of millions of years).
IIRC, Saturn's rings are also relatively recent feature. If you think about it, what a time to be alive! Saturn and Uranus have rings and Sun and Moon are in so precious position, that we can experience total eclipse (this won't last too long also, relative to age of Solar system).
It's exactly why Uranus was my favorite planet growing up. It was such an outlier, which, if I dig farther into my psyche, probably aligned well with my self view as the only kid in my class who geeked out on space.
Speaking of Psyche (and mythology), the names of Uranus's moons are excellent.
For me it is precisely because I always had in mind the "featureless blue sphere" picture in mind, and never bothered to look deeper. Goes to show how important images are in the public sphere.
To me, after Saturn, Uranus is the most famous planet with rings because of toilet humor.
As an aside, either get or borrow a decent telescope and see the rings of Saturn and the Galilean Moons for yourself. It’s a really neat experience and gives you a direct personal shared experience with the birth of modern astronomy.
Whenever my children teach me something, it makes us so happy. They, for teaching their dad. Me, for learning something from such a special little person. It’s just the best.
This is my favorite part of my day. Yesterday we were just having dinner talking about god knows what when my 9 year old drops something into convo about The Homestead Act and how many acres you could by and how they had to be developed and all these bullet points about it I haven't retained when I may have read about it so many years ago. It was delightful.
Now, there was also the part about her thinking the Mexican–American War was in 1989. Which is Taylor Swift's birthday, her favorite artist. Which is hilarious on so many levels.
So that's what The Great War is about!
My godson once solemnly asked his dad "Were dinosaurs before or after steam engines?" which is obviously adorable.
They are very faint and difficult to detect. They weren't even observed directly when they were discovered. They were originally discovered when astronomers noticed that they occulted light of background stats.
Occluded
In astronomy we use the term "occulted" when one body passes in front of another and blocks its light.
TIL. Thank you
Neptune also has a ring.
Jupiter also has ring, but it is not apparent.
Neptune has rings as well, as does Jupiter.
My daughter said there are 5 oceans ... I said she was wrong, then we looked at a modern map. Who forgot to send out the memo about the Southern Ocean?
I highly recommend checking out what we learned about Saturn's rings from Cassini. One example: https://science.nasa.gov/resource/the-tallest-peaks-2/
Actually all 4 gas giants have rings, they're just much smaller and less visible than Saturn's. Jupiter and Neptune's rings are very slight, compared to Uranus' substantial ones and of course Saturn's gaudy decoration.