New Lord of the Rings? Planet has system 200 times bigger than Saturn

Before fans of the series J. R. R. Tolkien take heart, this is not a new adaptation of the work, but news that comes from space. Astronomers from the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands and the University of Rochester in the United States believe they have discovered a planetwhose ring system é 200 times greater than the planet Saturn. It is the first time that a structure of this dimension around a planet has been found outside our solar system.

The discovery speaks of a planet, identified as “J1407b" brown dwarf belonging to the orbit of the star “J1407”. The celestial body was observed by the first time in 2012, when scientists noticed an unusual variation in the behavior of light, which caused a 52 day eclipse.

The system is composed of more than 30 rings, each with tens of millions of kilometers across. The gaps detected in the system also suggest that part of the material may have already joined to the point of form moons. This phenomenon has also been observed in the rings of Saturn.

The researchers believe that the planet is probably a gas giant , the Jupiter ou Saturn, but with mass up to 40 times greater than Jupiter. To give you an idea, the study authors estimate that if the rings of Saturn were the same size as those of J1407b, they would be easily visible from the EARTH at night, being several times larger than the Moon full.

The rings were found in data collected by the observatory Super WASP, using a technology that detects the variation of light in the stars, as the planets make their orbits and their eclipses.

Source: CNet.