Scientists Celebrate As Webb Creates First-Ever 3D Map Of Auroras On Uranus

by Aaron Leong — Friday, February 20, 2026, 10:40 AM EDT

When it's not busy dissecting distant galaxies or creating dark matter maps, the James Webb Space Telescope is also making a name for itself closer to home. To wit, it has produced the first-ever three-dimensional images of upper atmosphere on Uranus, revealing a chaotic and shimmering world of infrared auroras.

By utilizing Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph, a global team of astronomers have successfully peered into Uranus' ignosphere, a region of the upper atmosphere loaded with charged particles. Unlike Earth’s auroras, which are primarily driven by solar winds, the auroras on Uranus are far more mysterious.

The new observations show that these light displays are not just fleeting flickers within the planet’s weather system. Webb's 3D mapping indicates that these auroral emissions are actually intertwined with the planet’s bizarre magnetic field, which is tilted 59 degrees away from its rotation axis and does not pass through the planet’s center. This misalignment creates a corkscrew effect as the planet rotates, causing auroras to appear in unexpected regions outside of traditional geographic poles.

uranus collage — For the first time, astronomers have mapped the vertical structure of Uranus’s upper atmosphere, uncovering how temperature and charged particles vary with height across the planet (Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, STScI, P. Tiranti, H. Melin, M. Zamani)

These findings could help explain why the upper atmospheres of giant planets like Uranus were hundreds of degrees warmer than models predicted based on solar heating alone. Webb's data suggests that the energy from these intense auroral displays is redistributed across the planet, acting as a secondary heat source that pumps thermal energy into the atmosphere. The new map has allowed the team to use the vertical structures of ionized hydrogen (H₃⁺) to track how heat flows from the auroral regions down into the deeper layers of the ice giant.

Beyond the atmospheric heat, these observations have provided a rare bonus look at the planet’s rotation period. Since Uranus lacks a solid surface and is shrouded in a featureless haze in visible light, determining its exact day length has been rather difficult The planet's full day was only recently confirmed to be 17 hours, 14 minutes, and 52 seconds, thanks to analysis of 11 years-worth of Hubble data.

This discovery could also help us better understand and study exoplanets. Many of the thousands of worlds discovered beyond our solar system fall into the sub-Neptune- or ice giant-size category. By decoding the atmospheric dynamics of Uranus, scientists can therefore better predict weather patterns, chemical compositions, and habitability potential of similar worlds orbiting distant stars.