Astronomers have found a planetary ring system with such enormous proportions, it makes Saturn’s rings look puny. The rings have formed around a young, giant exoplanet called J1407b, and they’re the first of their kind to be found outside our Solar System.
The rings were first discovered in 2012, thanks to a team led by Eric Mamajek from the University of Rochester in the US, but back then, they had no way of knowing just how big they were. They’ve since teamed up with researchers led by Matthew Kenworthy at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands to analyse 30 individual J1407b rings to finally realise the true scale of these concentric beauties.
Turns out, each ring is tens of millions of kilometres in diameter, and the gaps between them suggest that whole satellites – or ‘exomoons’ – have formed there, just like the many tiny ’shepherd’ moons of Saturn, such as Pan and Daphnis, that continue to orbit it. The diameter of the whole system is about 120 million kilometres wide.