A team of astronomers from the Leiden Observatory (Netherlands) and the University of Rochester (USA) has discovered a ring system close to a star similar to the Sun, named ‘J1407’ . The finding has been published in the Astrophysical Journal .
The planet in question was discovered a few years ago by the University of Rochester. Then, it was learned that this seemed to be of considerable size and was surrounded by a ring system, being the first of its kind found outside the Solar system. Now, thanks to new observations, scientists have discovered that these rings are gigantic: not only are they huge, but there are 30 rings and they occupy 120 million kilometers (200 times more than those of Saturn) . This size would mean that if Saturn had these kinds of rings, they would be visible to the naked eye from Earth just as we see the Moon every day in the sky, or even better.
Astronomers found these objects when they were eclipsing the star , a phenomenon that lasted several weeks and allowed experts to appreciate details such as the fineness of the rings. “The star is too far away for the rings to be observed well directly, but a detailed model could be made based on variations in the brightness of light from the star passing through the ring system,” explains Matthew Kenworthy, leader of the study.
“You could think of it as a kind of super-Saturn. Specifically, each ring measures tens of millions of kilometers in diameter . If the four great Galilean moons of Jupiter were ground into dust and ice and the material spread on their orbits in a ring around Jupiter, the ring would be so opaque to light that a distant observer seeing the ring pass in front of the Sun I would see a deep eclipse ”, clarifies Eric Mamajek, co-author of the study.
According to experts’ estimates, this colossal ring system is likely to contain roughly the mass of an Earth in light-obscuring dust particles and the planet to have an orbital period of about a decade in duration .
