Distant Ringed Object That Could Be 'Saturn On Steroids'

About 400 light years from our solar system, there is a celestial body that looks like Saturn on steroids. Its rings are about 200 times larger than its counterpart here, measuring about 75 million miles in diameter. The ring system is so large, in fact, that scientists aren’t sure why it doesn’t get ripped apart by the gravity of the star it orbits. One reason the rings might stay intact has to do with the direction in which they spin around the object at their centre, called J1407b. Scientists are not sure whether J1407b is a gigantic planet that measures many times larger than Saturn, or a failed star called a brown dwarf. There is a point in J1407b’s lopsided orbit when it comes close to its sun like star, which should disrupt the rings. But the rings remain unscathed for the most part because they spin around J1407b in the opposite direction that the object orbits around its star. Researchers run a lot of simulations of possible orbits for the planet to see if they could survive or not. If the planet moves clockwise and the rings moving counterclockwise, that is much more stable than if they move in the same direction, clockwise. The team realized that if the object and its rings spin out of syncs with each other the ice and debris that make up the ring system are never too close to the sun for too long, which makes them more stable. That means they can stay together in a ring formation in the face of the star’s intense gravity. Researchers prevailing theory for the retrograde spinning is that either the ring system or the celestial body was involved in some sort of catastrophic collision that altered how it spins, rather than forming naturally.