Long-sought auroral glow finally emerges under Webb’s powerful gaze.
Neptune lies in the frigid, dark, vast frontier of the outer edges of our solar system about 3 billion miles away from the Sun.
It’s only been visited once by a spacecraft back in 1989, and since then, observatories like NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have tracked the planet’s changing weather. Hubble even discovered a new moon orbiting the planet in 2013.
In many images, the planet appears as a blueish orb, sometimes with disappearing and reappearing dark spots. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has now revealed a different appearance—for the first time, a bright auroral glow from this ice giant.
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