Rings of Neptune

Common card · No. 255088

The rings of Neptune consist primarily of five principal rings. They were first discovered (as "arcs") by simultaneous observations of a stellar occultation on 22 July 1984 by Patrice Bouchet, Reinhold Häfner and Jean Manfroid at the La Silla Observatory (ESO) who were conducting a star occultation observation program proposed by André Brahic, Bruno Sicardy and Françoise Roques of the Paris-Meudon Observatory and William B. Hubbard's teams at Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory in Chile. They were eventually imaged in 1989 by the Voyager 2 spacecraft. At their densest, they are comparable to the less dense portions of Saturn's main rings such as the C ring and the Cassini Division, but much of Neptune's ring system is quite faint and dusty, in some aspects more closely resembling the rings of Jupiter. Neptune's rings are named after astronomers who contributed important work on the planet: Galle, Le Verrier, Lassell, Arago, and Adams. Neptune also has a faint unnamed ring coincident...

Read on Wikipedia · Image IMAGE: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI IMAGE PROCESSING: Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Public domain