New "Super-Saturn" planet found.

[Chris Miller]

http://earthsky.org/space/huge-distant-planet-has-rings-200-times-bigger-than-saturns
Read that, it's better at explaining it than me.

tl;dr: A planet, much larger than anything in our solar system, has been found to have a ring system over 200 times larger than Saturn's. If Saturn had rings that size, they would appear much larger than a full moon in the night sky here. For reference, if the sun was that far out, it would appear less than 1/4 the size it does now.

-=SPOILER=-

[mrz84]

Dang. That's big. And a sight to behold if it were really in our own solar system.

[CJC]

Hmm, second planet in the system's orbit. I wonder if it's gearing up to form a binary system. As the satellites create bigger and bigger gaps in the ring pattern they might lose orbit due to the size of the rotation and the mass they would collect from such motion. Moon crashing into the planet would increase the core mass which would increase its core's nuclear reactions; do we have any records of gas giants converting to stars? I know Jupiter was close because of its mass (well, close in a relative sense)...

Certainly neat, that's for sure.

[Chris Miller]

Hmm, second planet in the system's orbit. I wonder if it's gearing up to form a binary system. As the satellites create bigger and bigger gaps in the ring pattern they might lose orbit due to the size of the rotation and the mass they would collect from such motion. Moon crashing into the planet would increase the core mass which would increase its core's nuclear reactions; do we have any records of gas giants converting to stars? I know Jupiter was close because of its mass (well, close in a relative sense)...

Certainly neat, that's for sure.

Nah, a red dwarf star has greater than 100 times Jupiter's mass.
Below that, say down to 50-ish Jupiter masses, you get what's called a "brown dwarf", which doesn't have enough mass to generate a self-sustaining fusion reaction. Some of those are theorized to have very small (and very cold) planetary systems, and the low-mass ones resemble hot gas giants more than they do stars.

[SUCCESSOR]

Am I the only one that thinks the 'bigger than our full moon appears" is a massive exaggeration? If you look at Saturn through a 200x telescope it appears nothing like the full moon.

[Chris Miller]

It depends more on the diameter of the lens than the power. That's why observatories have such big telescopes.
Also, a ring system that large would reflect a huge amount of sunlight.

[rock_nog]

I'm just curious to know how they detected the ring system. I mean, aren't extrasolar planets often detected just based on the gravitational wobble of their stars? Well, I take that back, they have detected some now by measuring changes in brightness as the planet passes in front of the star, but yeah, still, I'm kinda curious as to how they know it has rings.

[Chris Miller]

It was discovered by the transit method.
http://exoplanet.eu/catalog/1swasp_j1407_b/

The more recent shots they got of it were clear enough that they could detect a gap in the rings that could only have been made by an orbiting moon.