THURSDAY, JANUARY 2, 2003 -- B B C -- THE "VERY LARGE TELESCOPE" (V. L. T.) has captured a remarkable image of the planet Uranus circled by some of its moons. The rings of the planet... which is some 3,000 million kilometres away from the Earth... were clearly displayed in the image.
THE RINGS are almost undetectable from Earth in visible light.
The V.L.T. is located at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in Chile. The image was obtained in near-infrared, and contains seven of its moons.
Two of the moons in the picture, Puck and Portia, were only found in the 1980's as the Voyager probe prepared for its fly-by of the planet.
Uranus, which is at a distance from the Earth equivalent to 20 times the distance between the Earth and sun, was first spotted by William Herschel in 1781.
