Super Saturn – Biggest Ring System So Far
If you were also a fan of Saturn’s rings like me, then I’m no more in your club. There is Super Saturn, having the biggest ring system so far.
The above picture is an Artist’s concept of the ring system around a young giant planet or brown dwarf J1407b.
An international team of astronomers has discovered that a ring system around a distant planet – called J1407b – is enormous proportions, much larger and heavier than Saturn’s ring system. Scientists are calling it a “Super Saturn”, having the biggest ring system so far.
The planet orbits star J1407, located approximately 434 light-years from Earth. Astronomers first identified the ring system – the first of its kind to be found outside our solar system – in 2012. A new analysis of the data, published in the Astrophysical Journal, shows that the ring system consists of more than 30 rings, each of them tens of millions of kilometres in diameter. Furthermore, the analysis found gaps in the rings, which indicate that satellites (“exomoons”) may have formed.
