Thursday 29 January 2015

One Of The Most Easily Recognisable Planets In Our Solar System Is Saturn,

with it's hundreds of rings,

the rings measuring some 175,000 miles across are a feature of every illustration of the planet, but now there is an object with an even lager radius of rings, the planet is named J1407b after the star it orbits, J1407, pictured above is a artist rendition of J1047b, it has 37 rings, with a total radius of the rings reaching 55 million miles, to put that in perspective, the distance from the Earth to the Sun is roughly 92 million miles, J1407b is between 10 and 40 times the size of Jupiter, that's so huge that while scientists are pretty sure it's not a star, they are still trying to determine if it is a true exoplanet, or a brown dwarf an object that's neither a planet or a star, but stuck somewhere in between,

an easier way to picture the size of J1407b is to look at this scale picture of what it and it's rings would look like in our sky (above the Old Observatory in Leiden, Netherlands) if it was located where Saturn is now, notice the moon on the left for scale, J1407b is truly huge.


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