Out of this World Discovery

Astronomers have discovered a planetary body, J1407b, outside of our solar system with rings 200 times larger than those that surround Saturn. J1407b lies at about 400 light-years away from earth.

Astronomers at the University of Rochester in New York discovered what is either a young giant planet or a brown dwarf with an enormous ring system in 2012. It was the first ring system similar to Saturn's discovered outside of our solar system.

They found the planet and its rings by observing how the rings of J1407b are affected as they pass across the nearby star J1407. J1407 is described as a very young sun-like star, and the observation of this star's light was how the astronomers were able to make this discovery.

Astronomers at the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands added to the discovery by realizing that the ring system consisted of 30 rings and each one is tens of millions of kilometers in diameter, while the diameter of the entire ring system is about 120 million kilometers. As a note for comparison, Leiden's Matthew Kenworthy, claims that if we could replace Saturn's rings with J1407b's rings, they would be easily visible at night and much larger than a full moon.

They also found a clean gap in the ring structure, which they believe to be a satellite the size of earth that formed and carved out the gap. The satellite would have an orbital period of two years around J1407b. Astronomer, Eric Mamjamek, explains that, "The planetary science community has theorized for decades that planets like Jupiter and Saturn would have had, at an early stage, disks around them that then led to the formation of satellites. However, until we discovered this object in 2012, no-one had seen such a ring system. This is the first snapshot of satellite formation on million-kilometer scales around a substellar object."

The work of these astronomers was recently completed and published and hopefully they will continue to discover fascinating aspects of space such as this.