This Sun-like star's rings are 200 times larger than Saturn's

Astronomers have recently revealed that gigantic ring system around J1407b is much larger and heavier than Saturn's ring system.

Astronomers at the Leiden Observatory, The Netherlands, and the University of Rochester, USA, have discovered that the ring system that they see eclipse the very young Sun-like star J1407 is of enormous proportions, much larger and heavier than the ring system of Saturn.

The ring system, the first of its kind to be found outside our solar system, was discovered in 2012 by a team led by Rochester's Eric Mamajek.

new analysis of the data, led by Leiden's Matthew Kenworthy, shows that the ring system consists of over 30 rings, each of them tens of millions of kilometers in diameter. Furthermore, they found gaps in the rings, which indicate that satellites ("exomoons") might have formed.

The light curve tells astronomers that the diameter of the ring system was nearly 120 million kilometers, more than two hundred times as large as the rings of Saturn. The ring system likely contains roughly an Earth's worth of mass in light-obscuring dust particles.

Astronomers expect that the rings will become thinner in the next several million years and eventually disappear as satellites form from the material in the disks.

Astronomers estimated that the ringed companion J1407b has an orbital period roughly a decade in length. The mass of J1407b has been difficult to constrain, but it was most likely in the range of about 10 to 40 Jupiter masses.

The study is published in the Astrophysical Journal.