Neptune appears with a new image thanks to the space telescope James Webbwho caught the clearest view of his rings in over 30 years and seven of its many moons.

Infrared vision from the new telescope reveals this ice giant beneath a whole new lightassures in a note the European Space Agency (ESA), which participates in James Webb alongside the American NASA and the Canadian CSA.

The images give a clear view of its rings, some of which had not been seen until now and others which had not been captured in this level of detail from the space probe Traveler 2 came closest to the planet in 1989 and clearly shows the faint dust lanes surrounding the planet.

Neptune, discovered in 1846, is 30 times farther from the Sun than Earth and orbits in one of the darkest parts of the solar system. A noon there is similar to a faint twilight on Earth, recalls the ESA.

Webb also caught seven of the fourteen known moons of Neptune and in the image you can see a very bright point of light with the characteristic diffraction peaks seen in many telescope images, but not a starbut the planet’s most unusual moon, Triton.

Covered in an icy sheen of condensed nitrogen, Triton reflects on average 70% of the sunlight that reaches it, with which it far exceeds Neptune, as the planet’s atmosphere is darkened by the absorption of methane at Webb wavelengths Triton has a strange retrograde orbit around Neptune, leading astronomers to speculate that this moon was actually an object Kuiper Belt which was gravitationally captured by the planet.

Additional studies of Triton and Neptune, remember the ESA note. Neptune is characterized by being an ice giant due to the chemical composition of its interior, which is evident in the characteristic blue appearance of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope – predecessor to the James Webb – in visible wavelengths, caused by small amounts of methane gas.

In Webb’s footage, thanks to his near-infrared camera Neptune does not appear blue. Additionally, a thin line of brightness is seen around the planet’s equator, which could be a visual signature of the global atmospheric circulation driving the planet’s winds and storms.

Neptune’s 164-year orbit means its north pole is just out of sight of astronomers, but Webb’s images hint “an intriguing glow in this domain.”

A previously known vortex at the south pole is evident in Webb’s view, but for the first time it has revealed a continuous band of clouds which surrounds it.