'Super Star' Has Rings 200 Times Larger than Saturn

A young sun-like star deemed J1407 is so big and heavy, it makes Saturn look like a blip on the radar. Astronomer Eric Mamajek at the University of Rochester and his co-author from the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, have discovered that the ring system on this mega star has enormous proportions, much bigger than Saturn, and it's the first of its kind to be found outside our solar system.

Awkwardly deemed J1407, this mega planet was discovered in 2012, but a new analysis found that the ring system consists of 30 rings, each of which reach tens of millions of kilometres in diameter. If that wasn't cool enough, the gap in each ring indicates the potential existence of extrasolar moons, similar to the gas exhausting moons found in Saturn's ring.

“The details that we see in the light curve are incredible. The eclipse lasted for several weeks, but you see rapid changes on time scales of tens of minutes as a result of fine structures in the rings,” said Kenworthy. “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.”

“This planet is much larger than Jupiter or Saturn, and its ring system is roughly 200 times larger than Saturn’s rings are today,” said co-author Mamajek, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester. “You could think of it as kind of a super Saturn.”

The light curve emulated from this super planet led astronomers to believe that the rings are more than two hundred times as large as the rings of Saturn. The ring system is also believed to contain roughly an Earth's worth of mass in light-obscuring dust particles.

“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, multi-day eclipse,” said Mamajek. “In the case of J1407, we see the rings blocking as much as 95 percent of the light of this young Sun-like star for days, so there is a lot of material there that could then form satellites.”

It won't happen in our lifetime, but unfortunately, these rings won't be around forever. Astronomers expect the rings will thin out over the next several million years and eventually disappear, as satellites form from material found in between the rings.

Photo credit: University of Rochester Newsroom. (Ron Miller).