Saturn nasa images3/1/2024 ![]() Astronomers think Enceladus is a strong candidate for supporting life: After research published last month detected phosphorus in data collected by the Cassini spacecraft, scientists have now found all six elements essential to life as we know it in material from Enceladus’ ocean. The moons seen to the left of Saturn are Dione, Tethys and Enceladus. Research published earlier this year suggests that Saturn’s rings are much younger than the planet itself. The Encke gap in Saturn’s A ring, also seen in the image, is where the moon Pan resides. A few even rival Earth’s mountains in size.īetween the A and B rings lies the Cassini division, a 2,920-mile gap shown in the NIRCam image. Some pieces are smaller than a grain of sand, while others are the size of a house. Each ring comprises chunks of rock and ice from bodies like comets and asteroids, broken apart by the planet’s gravity. The planet has seven rings in total, named alphabetically in the order they were discovered. Visible in the image are Saturn’s A, B, C and F rings. Three of Saturn's moons and four of its seven rings are on display in the new image. While this effect makes the planet look dark, its icy rings appear to shine, reflecting plenty of light that the telescope can detect. That’s because, at the infrared wavelengths observed by NIRCam, methane gas absorbs most of the sunlight hitting the planet’s atmosphere, according to a NASA blog post. ![]() “It’s not a familiar view of Saturn by any stretch of the imagination,” Leigh Fletcher, a planetary scientist at the University of Leicester in England, tells New Scientist’s Alex Wilkins. Webb’s capture of Saturn appears starkly different from past images of the planet-gone are the gas giant’s recognizable bands, and in their place is a darker-looking orb encircled by the rings. Three of its moons can be seen as pinpricks of light on the left side. In the new picture from the telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), four of Saturn’s rings shine brightly, with the planet itself appearing dimmer. With this new view of the iconic planet, the telescope has now taken images of all four of the solar system’s gas giants. The James Webb Space Telescope has captured its stunning, first official image of Saturn and its rings.
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