Uranus, the ice giant seen by James Webb, is a dynamic world with rings, moons, storms, extreme seasons and more. Webb's sensitivity even captured the nearby Zeta ring: faint, diffuse and hard to make out.

These new images reveal detailed features of Uranus' seasonal north polar cap and bright storms near and below the cap's southern boundary. If humans want to send a spacecraft to visit Uranus up close, it is necessary to understand how to orient debris from its rings.

Because of the planet's extreme inclination of 98 degrees, its seasons are also extreme. In a quarter of the year the Sun shines at one pole, which means that half the planet experiences a dark winter for 21 Earth years.

Uranus is a good example of the many types of distant exoplanets being explored. Learning more about Uranus can help us understand more about planets of this size in general, including their meteorology and how they form.

Image description:

Shows an image with a black background. The planet Uranus is a glowing sphere near the centre, surrounded by rings. The planet appears blue with a large white patch covering its right half. The patch is whitest in the centre, then turns blue as it expands from right to left. A thin outline of Uranus is also white. Around the planet is a system of intertwined rings. Scattered throughout the image are pale orange and off-white blobs of background galaxies, some oval, some circular. Several bright blue spots close to Uranus are satellites of the source planet. Also to the left of the field is a bright star with 8 diffraction spikes. Slide 2 is a zoomed-in version of the same image. The outermost ring is the brightest and the innermost ring is the dimmest. Unlike Saturn's horizontal rings, Uranus' rings are vertical, so they appear to surround the planet in an oval shape. There are 9 bluish-white dots scattered around the rings.