In 2009, a group of planetary science experts discovered a new ring around Saturn, made up, for the most part, of small, dark dust particles, a peculiarity that made it very difficult to detect. However, data obtained by NASA's Spitzer infrared space telescope revealed the presence of this structure, which appeared to extend some 6 million kilometers from the gas giant.
Now, a team of researchers from the Universities of Virginia and Maryland and the California Institute of Technology has found that the size of that ring is even larger. From the images taken by the US space agency's WISE probe, which also uses infrared, they have calculated that it actually extends to 16 million kilometers from Saturn. That is, it would be approximately ten times larger than the E ring of this planet , which had been considered the largest of all. To give us an idea of its dimensions, the scientists give the following example: if Saturn were the size of a basketball, the new ring would be 75 meters away.
The researchers suspect that the particles that make it up are billions of years old and that they would come from the moon Phoebe, almost 13 million kilometers away . Given the similarities that exist between the satellites of Saturn and those of Jupiter, they also believe that the latter may also have a giant ring that has not yet been detected.
