Huge ring system around distant exoplanet is heavier, bigger than Saturn's

The sixth planet from the sun has nothing on J1407b, a giant expolanet with rings 200 times larger than Saturn's.

The planetary ring system was discovered in 2012, and is the first of its kind to be found outside of the solar system. In Astrophysical Journal, researchers write that the scale of the rings is even greater than first thought: More than 30 individual rings are tens of millions of miles in diameter, and between each ring there are gaps that point towards the presence of exomoons, Discovery News reports.

"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," lead author Matthew Kenworthy of Leiden Observatory said. "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."

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