Newly discovered ring system is 200 times larger than Saturn's

Newly discovered ring system is 200 times larger than Saturn's

(Courtesy of Ron Miller/University of Rochester)


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ROCHESTER, New York — Saturn’s rings have been admired for hundreds of years, but the planet may now have some competition.

Astronomers have determined there are more than 30 rings in a system that eclipses a young sun-like star known as J1407, according to researchers from the Netherlands’ Leiden Observatory and the University of Rochester. They reported the ring system is the first of its kind found outside of our solar system and that it is “much larger and heavier than the ring system of Saturn.”

“The star is much too far away to observe the rings directly, but we could make a detailed model based on the rapid brightness variations in the star light passing through the ring system,” Leiden researcher Matthew Kenworthy said in a statement. “If we could replace Saturn’s rings with the rings around J1407b, they would be easily visible at night and be many times larger than the full moon.”

Gaps in the rings indicate satellites, or exomoons, may have formed in the large system, according to astronomers. They estimated that each ring is tens of millions of kilometers in diameter, making the ring system approximately 200 times larger than Saturn’s rings.

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The ring system circles a young planet-like object called J1407b that is “much larger than Jupiter or Saturn,” researchers said. The ring system was originally discovered in 2012. It is about 120 million kilometers in diameter and “likely has an Earth’s worth of mass in light-obscuring dust particles,” according to the University of Rochester.

“If you were to grind up the four large Galilean moons of Jupiter into dust and ice and spread out the material over their orbits in a ring around Jupiter, the ring would be so opaque to light that a distant observer that saw the ring pass in front of the sun would see a very deep, multi-day eclipse,” co-author Eric Mamajek said in a statement. “In the case of J1407, we see the rings blocking as much as 95 percent of the light of this young sun-like star for days, so there is a lot of material there that could then form satellites.”

The findings will be published in the Astrophysical Journal. A data analysis can be viewed online.

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Natalie Crofts

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