'Super Saturn' Has Ring System That Stretch Tens Of Millions Of Kilometers, Possible Exomoons Too

Imagine if Saturn had rings that stretched for tens of millions of miles through the solar system. The rings would be brighter than a full moon and easily seen in the night sky. That would be a reality if we were living on the newly discovered J1407b, a planet outside our solar system, researchers from the University of Rochester said. Dubbed a "Super Saturn," the planet is surrounded by 30 rings that are heavier and longer than those in Saturn's famed ring system.

The rings surrounding J1407b are not the only exciting thing about the planet or brown dwarf. The rings contain enough material that moons can form within the system and there are spaces that indicate the possibility of such "exomoons." A brown dwarf is an object that's somewhere between a planet and star -- too large to be the former but too small to be the latter. Future observations will have to determine the nature of J1407b, which is larger than Saturn and Jupiter.

When astronomers discovered it, the first thing they noticed was the unusual eliclipses caused by the ring system. The rings contain enough material to block 95 percent of its young host star J1407, the researchers said. "If you were to grind up the four large Galilean moons of Jupiter into dust and ice and spread out the material over their orbits in a ring around Jupiter, the ring would be so opaque to light that a distant observer that saw the ring pass in front of the sun would see a very deep, multiday eclipse," Eric Mamajek, from the University of Rochester and lead astronomer, said in a statement.

The ring system has a diameter of 120 million kilometers and astronomers were able to determine its size and mass. The researchers used data collected from SuperWASP project, a British project searching for exoplanets. The SuperWASP can detect the dip in light when a planet passes in front of its host star and astronomers can determine the relative size of the planet based on the change. The initial study detected the odd eclipses of the star, since attributed to the planet's rings, and the latest study determined the mass of the rings.

Over time, the rings will become shepherd moons, satellites orbiting near the edges of the rings. Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and, possibly, Neptune have shepherd moons. The research was published in the Astrophysical Journal.