This artist's conception shows a nearly invisible ring around Saturn - the largest of the giant planet's many rings. It was discovered by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope
This artist's conception shows a nearly invisible ring around Saturn - the largest of the giant planet's many rings. It was discovered by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. (c) NASA, JPL-Caltech, Keck
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Tags: Phoebe, planet, ring, Saturn, Spitzer

Spitzer discovers an enormous ring around Saturn

Science Centric | 8 October 2009 06:16 GMT
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NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered an enormous ring around Saturn - by far the largest of the giant planet's many rings. The new belt lies at the far reaches of the Saturnian system, with an orbit tilted 27 degrees from the main ring plane. The bulk of its material starts about six million kilometres (3.7 million miles) away from the planet and extends outward roughly another 12 million kilometres (7.4 million miles).

One of Saturn's farthest moons, Phoebe, circles within the newfound ring, and is likely the source of its material.

Saturn's newest halo is thick, too - its vertical height is about 20 times the diameter of the planet. It would take about one billion Earths stacked together to fill the ring.

'This is one super-sized ring,' said Anne Verbiscer, an astronomer at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. 'If you could see the ring, it would span the width of two full moons' worth of sky, one on either side of Saturn.' Verbiscer; Douglas Hamilton of the University of Maryland, College Park; and Michael Skrutskie, of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, are authors of a paper about the discovery published online by the journal Nature.

Source: NASA

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