Auroras on ice giant revealed: Space photo of the day

The cyan or light blue areas seen on the right-side image of Neptune are an auroral glow detected by the James Webb Space Telescope's Near-Infrared Spectrograph. The aurora have been overlayed on an image of Neptune taken by the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 (at left). (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Heidi Hammel (AURA), Henrik Melin (Northumbria University), Leigh Fletcher (University of Leicester), Stefanie Milam (NASA-GSFC))

For the first time, the James Webb Space Telescope (JSWT) has revealed bright auroral activity on the planet Neptune.

Capturing the auroral activity on the ice giant has been long in coming, even though similar areas of trapped solar energetic particles have been successfully imaged in the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus.