It is the most impressive-looking planet in our solar system, however, the James Webb Space Telescope has managed to capture the brightest image of the planet Saturn, specifically of its rings.

Saturn itself appears extremely dark at this infrared wavelength observed by the telescope, as the methane gas absorbs almost all of the sunlight that falls into the atmosphere. However, the icy rings remain bright, leading to Saturn’s unusual appearance in the Webb image.

This new image of Saturn clearly shows details within the planet’s ring system, along with many of the planet’s moons – Dione, Enceladus and Tethys.

Researchers recently used Webb to explore Enceladus and found a large plume ejecting from the moon’s south pole that contains both particles and copious amounts of water vapor—this plume feeds Saturn’s E ring.

Saturn’s atmosphere also shows surprising and unexpected details. Although the Cassini spacecraft observed the atmosphere with greater clarity, this is the first time the planet’s atmosphere has been seen with this clarity at this particular wavelength (3.23 microns), which is unique to Webb. The large, dark, diffuse structures in the northern hemisphere do not follow the planet’s latitude lines, so this image does not have the familiar striped appearance usually seen from Saturn’s deeper atmospheric layers. The spot is reminiscent of large-scale planetary waves in the stratospheric aerosols high above the main clouds, potentially similar to those observed in early Webb NIRCam observations of Jupiter.

When comparing the planet’s north and south poles in this image, the differences in appearance are characteristic of known seasonal changes in Saturn. For example, Saturn is currently experiencing northern summer, with the southern hemisphere emerging from darkness at the end of a winter. However, the north pole is particularly dark, perhaps due to an unknown seasonal process that particularly affects polar aerosols. A small hint of glow toward the edge of Saturn’s disk may be due to high-altitude methane fluorescence (the process of light emission after light absorption), emission from trihydrogen ion (H3+) in the ionosphere, or both. Spectroscopy from Webb could help confirm this.

Missions such as NASA’s Pioneer 11, Voyagers 1 and 2, the Cassini spacecraft, and the Hubble Space Telescope have monitored Saturn’s atmosphere and rings for many decades. These observations from Webb are just a hint of what this observatory will add to Saturn’s history in the coming years, as the science team digs into the data to prepare peer-reviewed results.