The first detections of Neptune’s rings (like those of Uranus) came from occultations. JWST’s first images contain a great deal of information about the ring set, including important details that we can tease out by looking at the original source frames.

In recent decades, our largest telescopes had only been able to image the densest parts of Neptune’s rings, and only barely. The ring system was the surprise breakout star of the JWST Neptune images. And although JWST has only captured a brief glimpse of the Neptune system, we are already seeing just how much this powerful telescope might be able to tell us about the planet, its rings and moons, and potentially other similar worlds. Until a mission is sent to study an ice giant up close, advances in understanding this important class of planets will rely crucially on JWST and other telescopes. Studying Neptune can also give us insights into worlds beyond the Solar System our studies of planetary systems around other stars suggest that objects in the size range of Neptune are abundant throughout our galactic neighborhood. Each new thing we learn about Neptune makes a huge contribution to our understanding of it. We know so little about ice giants that studies of the Neptune system are largely in the realm of pure scientific discovery.

Its extreme distance from Earth makes it extraordinarily difficult to study with even the world’s largest telescopes, but efforts to study Neptune are well worth the investment. This planet, like its fraternal twin Uranus, is one of the least explored planets in our Solar System, only briefly visited by Voyager 2 in 1989. 21, 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) turned its golden mirrors toward the ice giant Neptune.

Neptune pictures james webb