Hello and welcome back to the episode 5 of Season 3 and today we are ready to venture on a journey to a planet parked in our neighborhood. Today I will tell you about the planet Uranus. Stop laughing. I will also tell you about the findings related to this gas giant by James Webb Space Telescope.
Uranus is the 7th planet from Sun, sitting behind the Saturn and for decades our only visual way to study this frozen world was through a brief flyby made by Voyager 2 in 1986. To humanity, it appeared like a faint blue ball but what happens when you point the most powerful infrared telescope at it? We get new insights on this icy world. In the past, most of the research was being carried out by ground based telescopes or the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble works in visible light meanwhile ground one worked on radio based astronomy. That is where James came in to help us out. Launched in 2021, this telescope has made groundbreaking discoveries and in the turn of events when it was pointed at Uranus, this is what it discovered. Since this telescope works in infrared spectrum, Uranus glows in that light.
In the images released by NASA and ESA, when Webb’s NIRCam or Near Infrared Camera was pointed at these rings, it successfully captured 11 out of 13 rings of Uranus including the most faint one- Zeta ring. This was not the only thing JWST captured. Instead, it peered deeply into the planet’s thick atmosphere and found something that shattered the old ideas astronomers had about the planet. Astronomers using Webb, mapped the upper atmosphere and the ionosphere of Uranus in a way that has never been done in human history. Because Uranus has a highly asymmetric magnetic field because of its tilting position on side, Auroras here don’t just occur at north and south poles. Instead they shift and dance across different parts of the planet. Webb has detected emission line of a specific molecule called ionized Hydrogen and by tracking this glow, astronomers have successfully mapped the temperature variations in the planet’s upper atmosphere that shows it is cooling down. And the bizarre part about these findings is that unlike what the models predicted, Uranus upper atmosphere is way cooler and is still cooling down. This has unraveled one of the biggest mystery about this planet but has also raised some new questions before the astronomers that we will have to wait for to be answered as more data is gathered through the world’s most powerful infrared telescope.Now, its facts time and this episode won’t look complete without some random facts about this planet. Uranus is titled at 98 degrees which means it rolls around the Sun on its sides. It’s the only planet in our Solar system doing revolution in such manner. It is the third largest planet in the solar system and takes 84 Earth years to complete one orbit around the Sun. Uranus also had 28 moons.
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