The European Space Agency announced that a study using the James Webb Space Telescope has examined Uranus’s upper atmosphere, marking a key step in understanding ice giants.

Researchers mapped the planet’s ionosphere, which extends up to 5,000 kilometers above the cloud tops and interacts with Uranus’s tilted and offset magnetic field, influencing its auroras.

Using the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), the team built a 3D map of temperature and ion density across a full planetary rotation, revealing that the highest temperatures occur 3,000–4,000 km up, while peak ion densities are around 1,000 km.

The findings help probe the planet’s magnetic field and core while providing insights applicable to other ice giants in the solar system and beyond, Extreme Tech has reported.

This study builds on knowledge from Voyager 2.