Astronomers Discover Solar System's Largest Planetary Ring Yet Around Saturn

RING LEADER: An artist's conception of the faint, newfound ring around Saturn. The ring dwarfs the scale of the familiar system of rings closer to the planet. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Keck

From Scientific American:

A diffuse, newfound ring encircles the gas giant planet at an extraordinary distance.

A speculative search for a belt of debris stemming from one of Saturn's outer moons has turned up what appears to be the largest known planetary ring in the solar system.

The newfound ring, associated with the far-flung moon Phoebe, stretches to roughly 12.5 million kilometers from Saturn, if not more, according to a paper announcing the finding in this week's Nature. (Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group.) For comparison, the outer bound of Saturn's next largest known ring, the E ring, is less than half a million kilometers from the planet.

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Fantastic Photos Of Our Solar System

The robotic Cassini spacecraft which is now orbiting Saturn looked back toward the eclipsed Sun and saw a view unlike any other. CICLOPS, JPL, ESA, NASA

From The Smithsonian:

In the past decade, extraordinary space missions have discovered new features of the Sun, the planets and their moons.

We've been looking at other planets through telescopes for four centuries. But if you really want to get to know a place, there's no substitute for being there. And in the past decade, more than 20 spacecraft have ventured into the deepest reaches of our solar system. These probes, unlike the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories that merely orbit Earth, have actually traveled to other planets and approached the Sun, sending back pictures that humble or awe, even as they advance astronomers' understanding of our corner of the universe.

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