Young Exoplent's Giant Rings are 200 Times More Massive Than Saturn's

There may be a ring system that's actually larger and heavier than the famed rings of Saturn. Astronomers have found that the ring system that they see eclipse the very young sun-like star, J1407 is of enormous proportions.

This ring system consists of over 30 rings, each of them tens of millions of kilometers in diameter. Not only that, but the researchers found gaps in the rings that indicate that satellites, known as "exomoons," may have formed.

The ring system itself is located around a planet that's much larger than Jupiter or Saturn. In fact, the ring system is about 200 times larger than Saturn's rings are today.

"The details that we see in the light curve are incredible," says Matthew Kenworthy, one of the researchers, in a news release. "The eclipse lasted for several weeks, but you see rapid changes on the time scales of tens of minutes as a result of fine structures in the rings. 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."

The light curve tells astronomers that the diameter of the ring system is nearly 120 million kilometers. This means that it likely contains roughly an Earth's worth of mass in the form of light-obscuring dust particles. Yet the most interesting find are the gaps that signal satellites.

"One obvious explanation is that a satellite formed and carved out this gap," said Kenworthy. "The mass of the satellite could be between that of Earth and Mars. The satellite would have an orbital period of approximately two years around J1407b."

The findings are published in the Astrophysical Journal.

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