Super Saturn Spotted ~ Monster- Sized Ring System Circles Giant Alien Planet

Excerpt from
news.discovery.com

If you thought Saturn’s ring system was impressive, spare a thought

for the rings surrounding the giant exoplanet J1407b — the rings of

J1407b wouldn’t only dwarf Saturn’s, the system is so big that it

eclipses the massive world’s host star!

J1407b’s ring system was the first of its kind to be discovered outside of the solar system in 2012,

but in new research accepted for publication in the Astrophysical

Journal, the awesome scale of the rings has been realized. Over 30

individual rings have been observed, each one tens of millions of miles

in diameter, and between each concentric ring are gaps that indicate the

presence of exomoons — not too dissimilar to Saturn’s ‘shepherd moons’

that continue to shape Saturn’s rings today.

“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. 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.”

Although it has been long theorized that moons can form from

the debris surrounding planets, until 2012, astronomers hadn’t found any

example of a ringed gas giant beyond our solar system. But now they

have a super-sized ring system surrounding a world orbiting another star

that provides evidence for a system of exomoons embedded inside a vast

ring system.

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Super Saturn Spotted ~ Monster- Sized Ring System Circles Giant Alien Planet