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<p>It looks like Saturn, but it is the exoplanet j1407b, the full extent of the surprisingly dense rings is 180 million kilometers.</p>
<p>The J1407 b was discovered in 2012 and its data was collected and sent to be published just recently. It is located about 400 light years away from the earth. What is amazing is that the planet has a planetary ring system, just like Saturn, but these are 200 times larger. The rings are so large that if they belonged to Saturn they would occupy even the earth's sky, looking even larger than the moon. It is believed that the gaps between the rings are exolumns that orbit the exoplanet.</p>
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<p>Observing the repeated and extensive obscuration of a relatively similar Sun-like star, a team of astronomers has interpreted these observations as pointing to an eclipse caused by the complex ring system of the huge exoplanet, similar to Saturn, but much, much larger . What is more, apparent gaps and varying densities of the rings suggest the presence of at least one large exolumn, and perhaps even more in the process of formation!</p>
<p>J1407 is an orange dwarf star of the main sequence that lies 434 light-years away. For 57 days in 2007, J1407 experienced a "complex series of deep eclipses," which an international team of astronomers claims is the result of a ring system around the massive exoplanet J1407b orbiting the star.</p>
<p>"This planet is much larger than Jupiter or Saturn, and its ring system is about 200 times larger than Saturn's rings today," said Eric Mamajek, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester in New York. York. "You could think of it as a kind of super Saturn."</p>
<p>The observations were made with the SuperWASP program, which uses terrestrial telescopes to observe the weak decrease in the brightness of stars due to the transit of exoplanets.</p>
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<p>The first study of eclipses and the likely presence of the ring system was published in 2012, and was led by Mamajek. A deeper analysis of the team estimates that the number of main ring structures is 37, with a clearly defined gap located about 0.4 AU (61 million kilometers) of the "super Saturn" that can accommodate a satellite as large as The Earth, with an orbital period of two years.</p>
<p>The full extent of the surprisingly dense rings of J1407b is 180 million kilometers, and could contain a mass similar to that of Earth.</p>
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<p>"If we could replace Saturn's rings around the rings around J1407b, they would be easily visible at night and would be several times larger than the full moon," said Matthew Kenworthy of the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands and lead author of the new study.</p>
<p>These observations could be like looking back over time to see how Saturn and Jupiter looked when their own moonsystems were forming.</p>
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<p>"The planetary science community has theorized for decades that planets such as Jupiter and Saturn would have had discs around them at an early stage that would then lead to the formation of satellites," according to Mamajek. "However, until we discovered this object in 2012, no one had seen such a ring system. This is the first image of satellite formation on scales millions of miles around a substellar object. "</p>
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<p>It is estimated that J1407b contains 10 to 40 times the mass of Jupiter, so that, technically, it could be a brown dwarf.</p>
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<p>More observations will be needed to see another J1407b transit and get more data on its rings and other physical characteristics when its 10-year Earth orbit allows us to analyze it again.</p>
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<p><strong>Source: Exploring the universe</strong></p>
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