Super Saturn With Massive Rings Eclipses its Sun

Researchers have discovered the first ringed planet outside our solar system after the rings eclipsed the system's star!

Analysing data obtained in 2012 from the spotting of J1407, a young Sun-like star, researchers found that the star's light was eclipsed on and off over periods of tens of minutes, The Washington Post reported. This was when researchers concluded that they are the rings of the planet J1407b.

"This planet is much larger than Jupiter or Saturn, and its ring system is roughly 200 times larger than Saturn's rings are today. You could think of it as kind of a super Saturn," said the study's co-author Mamajek at the University of Rochester, in a news release.

"The details that we see in the light curve are incredible. The eclipse lasted for several weeks, but you see rapid changes on time scales of tens of minutes as a result of fine structures in the rings," said Matthew Kenworthy who led the research from The Netherlands' Leiden Observatory.

"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," he adds.

According to Discovery News, the ring system comprises 30 rings with gaps, indicating the presence of exomoons. The discovery is exciting cosmologists as evidence for ring debris forming moons has been not been available. The ring system 75 million miles wide and carries debris equivalent to the mass of Earth.