Scientists Discover Huge Ring around Saturn

The ring is made up of ice and dust particles that are so far apart that "if you were to stand in the ring, you wouldn't even know it", Verbiscer said in a statement. Photo by NASA

Scientists at NASA have discovered a nearly invisible ring around Saturn, one so large that it would take 1 billion Earths to fill it.

The ring's orbit is tilted 27 degrees from the planet's main ring plane. The bulk of it starts about 6 million kilometers away from the planet and extends outward another 12 million kilometers, CNN reported.

Its diameter is equivalent to 300 Saturns lined up side to side, while its entire volume can hold one billion Earths, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory said late Tuesday.

"This is one supersized ring", Anne Verbiscer, an astronomer at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, said.

Verbiscer and two others are authors of a paper about the discovery published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The ring is made up of ice and dust particles that are so far apart that "if you were to stand in the ring, you wouldn't even know it", Verbiscer said in a statement.

Also, Saturn doesn't receive a lot of sunlight, and the rings don't reflect much visible light.

However, the cool dust glows with thermal radiation. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, used to spot the ring, picked up on the heat.

"Astronomers have long suspected that there is a connection between Saturn's outer moon Phoebe and the dark material on Iapetus. This new ring provided convincing evidence of that relationship", Douglas Hamilton of the University of Maryland in College Park, said.

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