Enormous New Ring Found Distantly Orbiting Saturn


There's a new king of rings in the solar system: An enormous new ring has been discovered around Saturn, made up of debris from the gas giant's distant moon Phoebe.
Before the discovery of this massive ring — about 12.5 times the average distance between the Earth and the moon in width and 6 times that distance in thickness — the largest known planetary rings were Jupiter's gossamer rings and Saturn's E ring.
Astronomers have long suspected the presence of this ring, which orbits Saturn at a radius of about 8 million miles (13 million km) — 200 times the radius of the planet itself.

Full article by Andrea Thompson on Space.com

1 comments:

Unknown said...

My novel idea
Any huge mass like star has an outer icy ring. The new Largest Ring Around Saturn is similar to outer ring of stars such as outer icy ring of Epsilon Eridani
Ali Vaseghi
18 October 2009

 


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