Huge 'ghost' ring discovered around Saturn : Nature News Published online 7 October 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.979 News Huge 'ghost' ring discovered around Saturn Spitzer Space Telescope reveals a supersized dust belt. Michelle Grayson Astronomers have found an enormous ghostly ring around Saturn.Science Photo Library Saturn's ring system has just got a lot larger, with the discovery of a faint ring that stretches out millions of kilometres into space. But this new ring, which follows the orbit of one of Saturn's moons, Phoebe, is unlike any of the other rings that are closer to the planet: as well as being much thicker and wider, it is tilted from the plane of the other rings. Saturn's rings were first described by astronomer and mathematician Christiaan Huygens in 1655. Since then, astronomers have discovered more details about the number of rings in the system and their composition, aided recently by NASA's Cassini–Huygens mission.

It was thought that the farthest ring from Saturn — until now the largest known ring in the Solar System — was the E ring, which stretches from a distance of 3 Rs (where Rs is the radius of Saturn, equal to 60,330 kilometres) to 8 Rs, and is fed by active geysers on Saturn's icy moon Enceladus. However, this new ring dwarfs all the others, extending from approximately 128 Rs to 207 Rs with a vertical thickness of 40 Rs. "It is an analogue of the 'tiny' rings around Saturn, but on an immense scale," says Michael Skrutskie of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and one of the paper's authors 1 . "It is also a very tenuous ring, with an optical depth of only 2 x 10–8. That is the equivalent of 20 grains of material per cubic kilometre." Cryogenic clues The extremely sparse nature of the ring means that it reflects very little light and is practically invisible, which is why it has previously escaped detection.

Its existence was proposed based on the discovery of other satellite-associated rings — such as the Janus–Epimetheus Ring around Saturn detected in 2006 — which are formed from material ejected from planetary satellites following an impact. Phoebe Ring is much further out than Saturn's other rings.NASA/JPL-Caltech/R.Hurt (SSC) Inset image: NASA/WM.Keck Observatory/JPL-G. Orton "This was something that was not suspected before the Cassini mission," says Carl Murray, from the astronomy unit at Queen Mary, University of London, and a member of the Cassini imaging team. "We have since come to the conclusion that the origins of many of Saturn's inner rings are its satellites. Of course, these are very optically-thin rings and nothing like the spectacular rings we normally associate with Saturn." The new 'Phoebe Ring' describes the outer boundaries of Phoebe's orbit, and is at an angle of 27° with respect to the other rings. Phoebe travels in the opposite direction to most of the planet's other moons.

The ring was detected by thermal emission using the Spitzer Space Telescope's Multiband Imaging Photometer, which uses a cryogenic system to enable it to see such weak infrared signals. Skrutskie and his team confirmed their observations with images from the Spitzer archive. And in a bonus discovery, the team think they may also have solved an astronomical mystery. One hemisphere of Iapetus, the next moon in from Phoebe, is much darker in colour than the other half — an observation that astronomers have never fully explained. The team now believes that the Phoebe Ring could be the missing source of the darker material, as well as being responsible for reddish deposits on Hyperion, another Saturnian moon. However, the team has not yet managed to accurately determine the ring's structure or composition to confirm this hypothesis: "Now that Spitzer has exhausted its cryogen, we cannot make any more observations that way," Skrutskie explains. Further observations of the Phoebe Ring will have to wait until the infrared-optimized James Webb Space Telescope is operational following its launch in 2014. Until then, there will almost inevitably be more surprises from Saturn, Murray predicts.

"I doubt this ring could have been seen with Cassini; it shows how important it is to have different instruments working towards the same goal." References New ring discovered around Saturn, could explain dark side of its moon - Wikinews, the free news source New ring discovered around Saturn, could explain dark side of its moon From Wikinews, the free news source you can write! Image: NASA . Astronomers have found a huge new ring around the planet Saturn . The faint dust ring extends up to 7.4 million miles (12 million km) from the planet and could fit over a billion Earths inside it, making it the largest in the Solar System. It could also solve a mystery about one of Saturn's moons that has puzzled scientists for centuries. The ring was found with the help of NASA 's Spitzer Space Telescope , with details published today in the journal Nature. It is thought to consist of ice and dust from Saturn's moon Phoebe , which is kicked up by collisions with comets and then drifts in towards the planet. The ring and moon both orbit in a plane inclined at 27 degrees to the other rings.

"This is one supersized ring," said Dr Anne Verbiscer of the University of Virginia, one of the authors of the paper. Of Saturn's other rings, the largest is the E-ring, a mere 150,000 miles (240,000 km) in diameter. Jupiter also has "gossamer rings" of a similar diameter to the E-ring. If the Phoebe ring was visible from Earth, it would appear twice as large in the sky as the full Moon. However the newly found ring is extremely faint. It is made up of dust particles around 10 microns (thousandths of a millimetre) in size, and according to Verbiscer, "In a cubic km of space, there are all of 10-20 particles." This explains why it has evaded discovery until now. "If you were standing in the ring itself, you wouldn't even know it." The discovery could explain the two-tone appearance of Iapetus, shown here in an image from the Cassini space probe. Image: NASA . The Phoebe ring does not reflect much visible light, but the Spitzer telescope was able to pick up the dust's faint infra-red glow.

The telescope, launched in 2003, orbits the Sun and is roughly 66 million miles (107 million km) from Earth. It is one of NASA's four Great Observatories . The discovery could also finally account for the unusual appearance of Iapetus , another of the planet's moons. When Iapetus was first observed in 1671 by astronomer Giovanni Cassini, its leading side was seen to be much darker than the other. Until now scientists had been unsure why this was. Now it is thought that the moon orbits in the opposite direction to the ring, and as Iapetus moves through the ring, dust builds up on its front surface. Verbiscer likens it to "bugs on a windshield." "Astronomers have long suspected that there is a connection between Saturn's outer moon Phoebe and the dark material on Iapetus," said Douglas Hamilton, another author of the paper. The material has been found to have a similar composition to Phoebe's surface. "This new ring provided convincing evidence of that relationship." This is the second major discovery for astronomers studying Saturn in the past month.

In September, evidence from the Cassini orbiter showed that Saturn's other rings were far less flat than expected. Have an opinion on this story? Share it! Related news Biggest Ring Around Saturn Just Got Supersized Biggest Ring Around Saturn Just Got Supersized By Charles Q. Choi, Space.com Contributor | June 10, 2015 01:01pm ET MORE This artist's conception shows how Saturn's giant Phoebe ring would appear as seen in infrared light. Here, the ring is set against a background of stars lit by faint nebulas. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute A giant ring around Saturn is even larger than thought, spanning an area of space nearly 7,000 times larger than Saturn itself, researchers say. "We knew it was the biggest ring, but now we find it's even bigger than we thought, new and improved," the study's lead author, Douglas Hamilton, a planetary scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park, told Space.com. The immense ring was discovered around Saturn in 2009.

The dark grains of dust making up this faint ring are probably debris that cosmic impacts knocked off the gas giant's distant and equally dark moon Phoebe. "It's fascinating that this ring can exist," Hamilton said. "We're told in science textbooks that planetary rings are small and close to their parent planets — if they're too far away from their planets, moons form rather than rings. This discovery just turns that idea on its head — the universe is a more interesting and surprising place than we thought." [ Amazing Photos of Saturn's Rings ] This image of Saturn's dusty Phoebe ring, captured in 2009, shows the dust ring (inset) overlayed in tan colors based on data and observations. The Phoebe ring is much larger than Saturn's main ring and tilted with respect to Saturn as indicated here. Credit: NASA/JPL/U. Virginia Astronomers first suspected the existence of the Phoebe ring after looking at one of Saturn's other moons, Iapetus. "Like our moon, Iapetus always has one side facing toward Saturn, which means it also always has one side pointing in the direction of its motion around Saturn, its leading side," Hamilton said.

"Iapetus is an icy moon, and intrinsically bright white, but its leading face is very strikingly jet black. That contamination is what led us to look for what turned out to be a surprisingly large ring." NASA's infrared Spitzer Space Telescope first detected the Phoebe ring extending between distances of 128 to 207 times the radius of Saturn — that is, from about 4.8 million to 7.7 million miles (7.7 million to 12.4 million kilometers) from the planet. This made it about 12.5 times the average distance between Earth and the moon in width, well more than 10 times larger than Saturn's previously largest known ring, the E ring. [ Photos: The Rings and Moons of Saturn ] New infrared images from NASA's WISE spacecraft reveal the Phoebe ring actually extends between distances of 100 to a surprisingly distant 270 times the radius of Saturn — that is, about 3.75 million to 10.1 million miles (6 million to 16.2 million km) from the planet.

The dark grains making up the Phoebe ring absorb sunlight, which makes the ring difficult to see if one looks for visible light but much easier to see if one looks for heat in the form of infrared radiation, which the WISE spacecraft imaged. The researchers noted their new estimates are conservative ones. The Phoebe ring may actually extend between distances of 50 to more than 270 times the radius of Saturn. The Phoebe ring is made up mainly of dust particles about 10 to 20 microns in size, or about one-tenth to one-fifth the average width of a human hair. Rocks that are the size of soccer balls or larger with diameters of more than about 7.8 inches (20 centimeters) make up no more than about 10 percent of the ring. This NASA graphic shows the relationship between Saturn's giant Phoebe ring and the planet's moons Phoebe and Iapetus. Phoebe serves as the source of the ring's material while Iapetus is embedded in the ring. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute The particles making up the Phoebe ring may be millions to billions of years old, Hamilton said.

Their extreme age is most likely due to how spread out they are, and thus unlikely to strike and destroy each other in collisions. "A cubic kilometer of space in the Phoebe ring might have just a few dozen dust particles, maybe 100 at most," Hamilton said. "It's really empty." These findings suggest that Saturn possesses three kinds of rings, Hamilton said. The main rings are constantly changing, made of fast-moving house-size chunks of ice that gently collide, break apart and reform every hour or so. The E ring is filled with frozen water droplets from geysers on the icy moon Enceladus that last maybe a century or so before they strike another moon of Saturn or get blown away from the gas giant's orbit entirely. The vast Phoebe ring has million- to billion-year-old dust particles, and likely some larger objects as well. " Saturn's main rings are like the fabled elephant graveyard — mysterious and filled with mostly large bones that contain clues about the recent past," Hamilton said.

"The E ring, then, is the chipmunk graveyard in which all of the bones are small and from the modern era, and the Phoebe ring is the dinosaur graveyard in which we find ancient bones of all sizes, most of them tiny fragments but some quite immense." With more than 60 known moons to go along with its famous rings, Saturn is as intriguing as it is beautiful. How much do you know about the sixth planet from the sun? Enormous New Ring Found Distantly Orbiting Saturn Enormous New Ring Found Distantly Orbiting Saturn By Andrea Thompson, OurAmazingPlanet Managing Editor | October 7, 2009 09:32am ET MORE There?s a new king of rings in the solar system: An enormous new ring has been discovered around Saturn, made up of debris from the gas giant?s distant moon Phoebe. Before the discovery of this massive ring ? about 12.5 ?times the average distance between the Earth and the moon in width and 6 times that distance in thickness ? the largest known planetary rings were Jupiter's gossamer rings and Saturn's E ring .

Astronomers have long suspected the presence of this ring, which orbits Saturn at a radius of about 8 million miles (13 million km) ? 200 times the radius of the planet itself. "There were hints that it could be there," said Douglas Hamilton of the University of Maryland, one of the astronomers who found the ring. One such hint was the unusual coloring of Saturn's moon Iapetus , which had one dark side and one light side. Some astronomers suspected that the dark side, which looked suspiciously similar in composition to another of Saturn's satellite, Phoebe, was actually debris dust from Phoebe stuck to Iapetus' surface. But astronomers haven't been able to detect it until now because, "this thing is just immense," Hamilton told SPACE.com. "If you look at just a small patch of it, you just see fuzziness." Hamilton and his colleagues were finally able to see the behemoth ring with the infrared capability of the Spitzer Space Telescope. Spitzer was able to detect the sunlight reflected by the tiny dark black particles. The discovery is detailed in the Oct. 8 issue of the journal Nature.

The particles were likely created when asteroids, meteors or other bodies collided with Phoebe over the eons. While some of the particles are small enough to drift out of Saturn's gravitational grasp and into interplanetary space, others drift inwards toward the planet, where some get stuck to the leading hemisphere of Iapetus, which trawls through them. Periodic collisions replace the particles lost in these ways. Interestingly, Phoebe and its associated dust ring travel in the opposite direction of Saturn's other rings and satellites. The tiny particles are extremely diffuse, with only about 20 in every cubic kilometer of the ring, Hamilton said. "If you were there, you wouldn't know you were in a ring," he said. And because the other gas giants are known to have far-out, irregular satellites like Phoebe, it is likely that they also have similarly large, diffuse rings orbiting millions of kilometers out. "I think this is the tip of the iceberg," Hamilton said.

Planet With Supersized Rings MORE These ‘Vintage’ NASA Posters Imagine Travel Beyond the Stars “It took us a year even to convince ourselves of what we were seeing,” says Mamajek, whose paper is based on a new analysis of observations taken back in 2007 by the SuperWASP planet search project. At the time, the observations seemed to make no sense: when a planet passes in front of a star, you usually see a dip in starlight that lasts for up to a few hours. In this case, the starlight dimmed for two months. It wasn’t a steady dip, either. The star would fade, then brighten, then fade again, in a way that made no sense at all. When Mamajek and his group stumbled on the data in 2010, he says, “I took a printout of the light curve, put it on the wall, and stared at it for a week.” Crazy as it seemed, the most plausible explanation was a giant ring system with gaps like Saturn’s that let more or less light through at different times during the passage. “It’s the same indirect way the rings of Uranus were discovered in 1977,” he says.

The planet itself doesn’t show up in the observations, but that could be explained if the ring system is slightly off-center as it moves in front of the star. You can see how this works in an animation put together by Mamajek’s collaborator Matthew Kenworthy, of the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands. The star which the new planet orbits is thought to be very young—about 16 million years, compared with our own Solar System’s 4.6 billion. If the scientists are right about what they’re seeing, the mammoth ring system will get smaller over time as the outer bands condense into moons. “That’s what you see in [our] Solar System,” says Kenworthy. “You have rings tucked in close to the planets and moons further out. So presumably we’re seeing the intermediate step.” It all seems familiar, except for the ring system’s size, which is unprecedented—and which is the reason other astronomers are waiting to be convinced. “I agree with the authors that it’s appropriate to consider an interpretation based on rings,” says Eric Ford, an expert on exoplanets at Penn State.

The idea that the outer parts would condense into moons relatively quickly, however, means that we’re seeing the rings at their full extent during a very narrow window of existence—the sort of coincidence that scientists don’t love to see. “Whenever your explanation involves catching something during a phase that won’t last very long,” Ford says, “it’s a little concerning.” MORE Cousins of Earth Found Deep in Space Much of the doubt could be erased if astronomers could see the rings pass by again on another orbit around the star. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened: they’ve got only the single passage back in 2007, meaning the exoplanet is on a relatively long orbit. “We think it’s at least ten or 15 years,” says Kenworthy. They don’t know for sure, though, and since it’s tough to keep big telescopes aimed at this one star hoping for another passage, the astronomers have recruited members of the high-end amateur group, the American Association of Variable Star Observers , to monitor the situation. They’re also going back through digitized versions of old images from observatories around the world, looking for evidence of other stars that faded mysteriously for a while without explanation.

“Now that we know what we’re looking for,” Mamajek says, “we might find that there are lots of them out there.” They might, that is, if they’re really seeing rings. “I keep telling people, ‘if you can think of a better explanation, please let me know,'” Mamajek says, and he means it. So far, he has no takers. “The signal is very strong,” says Harvard’s David Kipping, who is doing his own search for exomoons, “and its difficult to believe the instrument could misbehave on such a huge scale. I think many of us find the signal interesting,” he says. That, by itself, is enough to keep the astronomy community looking. Scientists discover massive ring around Saturn - CNN.com Scientists discover massive ring around Saturn Story Highlights Newly discovered ring is so large it would take 1 billion Earths to fill it Ring is made up of ice and dust particles that are so far apart it's hard to see Ring material may come from comet, meteor collisions with moon Phoebe (CNN) -- Scientists at NASA have discovered a nearly invisible ring around Saturn -- one so large that it would take 1 billion Earths to fill it.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has spotted a massive, nearly invisible ring around Saturn. The ring's orbit is tilted 27 degrees from the planet's main ring plane. The bulk of it starts about 3.7 million miles (6 million km) away from the planet and extends outward another 7.4 million miles (12 million km). Its diameter is equivalent to 300 Saturns lined up side to side. And its entire volume can hold one billion Earths, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory said late Tuesday. "This is one supersized ring," said Anne Verbiscer, an astronomer at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Verbiscer and two others are authors of a paper about the discovery published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The obvious question: Why did it take scientists so long to discover something so massive? 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.

But the cool dust -- about 80 Kelvin (minus 316 degrees Fahrenheit) -- glows with thermal radiation. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, used to spot the ring, picked up on the heat. Don't Miss One of Saturn's moons, Phoebe, orbits within the ring. As Phoebe collides with comets, it kicks up planetary dust. Scientists believe the ice and dust particles that make up the ring stems from those collisions. The ring may also help explain an age-old mystery surrounding another of Saturn's moons: Iapetus. Astronomer Giovanni Cassini, who first spotted Iapetus in 1671, deduced the moon has a white and dark side -- akin to a yin-yang symbol. But scientists did not know why. The new ring orbits in the opposite direction to Iapetus. And, say researchers, it's possible that the moon's dark coloring is a result of the ring's dust particles splattering against Iapetus like bugs on a windshield.

"Astronomers have long suspected that there is a connection between Saturn's outer moon Phoebe and the dark material on Iapetus," said Douglas Hamilton of the University of Maryland in College Park -- one of the three authors reporting on the findings in the journal Nature. "This new ring provided convincing evidence of that relationship." Stupendous Ring System Discovered Around 'Super Saturn' Exoplanet | The Huffington Post Stupendous Ring System Discovered Around 'Super Saturn' Exoplanet 01/28/2015 08:38 am ET | Updated Jan 29, 2015 980 Macrina Cooper-White Associate Science Editor, The Huffington Post Call it Saturn on steroids! Astronomers have discovered an exoplanet with an enormous ring system that far surpasses Saturn's. “This planet is much larger than Jupiter or Saturn, and its ring system is roughly 200 times larger than Saturn’s rings are today,” Dr. Eric Mamajek, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester and the leader of the team of astronomers, said in a written statement.

“You could think of it as kind of a super Saturn .” (Story continues below image.) Artist’s conception of the extrasolar ring system around exoplanet J1407b. The rings are shown eclipsing the young sun-like star J1407, as they would have appeared in early 2007. The ring system--the first ever discovered outside our solar system--is believed to be made up of 37 rings, each of which measures tens of millions of miles in diameter. The system has a diameter of approximately 75 million miles, and is believed to contain an Earth's-worth mass of dust particles, along with a potential exomoon. The exoplanet at the center of the rings, dubbed J1407b, has been estimated to be at least four times as massive as Jupiter. The rings around J1407b are so large that if they were put around Saturn, we could see the rings at dusk with our own unaided eyes. Here are the rings as they would be seen in the skies at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Mamajek and his collaborators first hypothesized the ring system's existence in 2012, when they noticed something eclipsing J1407 , a young sunlike star located 420 light-years from Earth. The eclipse showed up in the star's so-called "light curve," a graph of the star's brightness captured over two months. "The eclipse lasted for several weeks, but you see rapid changes on time scales of tens of minutes as a result of fine structures in the rings,” Dr. Matthew Kenworthy, an astronomer at the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands and a member of the team, said in the statement. “The star is much too far away to observe the rings directly, but we could make a detailed model based on the rapid brightness variations in the star light passing through the ring system." The model helped the team estimate J1407b's mass and the size of the ring system (see an animation of the model here). It also revealed a clearly defined gap, suggesting the presence of a satellite carving its way through the rings. To learn more about the strange planet and its rings, the astronomers are asking amateurs to help monitor the light coming from J1407.

The research has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal . CLARIFICATION: This post has been updated from a previous version to specify the dimensions of the rings in terms of diameter. Also on HuffPost: Nasa discovers 'supersized' Saturn ring | Science | The Guardian Space Nasa discovers 'supersized' Saturn ring Thin array of ice and dust particles lies at far reaches of Saturnian system, starting about 6m kilometres from the planet Artist's rendering of the newly discovered ring around Saturn. The planet is shown enlarged in the inset image. Photograph: Nasa/AP Associated Press Wednesday 7 October 2009 03.15 EDT First published on Wednesday 7 October 2009 03.15 EDT This article is 7 years old A never-before-seen "supersized" ring around the planet Saturn has been discovered. The thin array of ice and dust particles lies at the far reaches of the Saturnian system and its orbit is tilted 27 degrees from the planet's main ring plane, Nasa's jet propulsion laboratory said.

A spokeswoman, Whitney Clavin, said the ring was very diffuse and did not reflect much visible light, but the infrared Spitzer space telescope was able to detect it. No one had looked at its location with an infrared instrument until now, Clavin said. The ring dust is very cold – minus 193C – but it shines with thermal radiation. The bulk of the material starts about 6m kilometres from the planet and extends outward about another 12m kilometres. Saturn was previously known to have seven main rings and several faint, unnamed rings. A paper on the discovery was to be published online today by the journal Nature . "This is one supersized ring," said one of the authors, Anne Verbiscer, an astronomer at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Her co-authors are Douglas Hamilton of the University of Maryland, College Park, and Michael Skrutskie, also of the University of Virginia. Saturn's moon Phoebe orbits within the ring and is believed to be the source of the material. The ring may answer the riddle of another moon, Iapetus, which has a bright side and a very dark side.

The ring circles in the same direction as Phoebe, while Iapetus, the other rings and most of Saturn's other moons go the opposite way. Scientists think material from the outer ring moves inward and slams into Iapetus. "Astronomers have long suspected that there is a connection between Saturn's outer moon Phoebe and the dark material on Iapetus," said Hamilton. "This new ring provides convincing evidence of that relationship." The Spitzer mission, launched in 2003, is managed by the jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California. Spitzer is 106m kilometres from Earth in orbit around the sun. Discovery: 'Super Saturn' with rings 200 times as big - CNN.com 1 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe PGC 1000714 was initially thought to be a common elliptical galaxy, but a closer analysis revealed the incredibly rare discovery of a Hoag-type galaxy. It has a round core encircled by two detached rings. Hide Caption 2 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe NASA's Cassini spacecraft took these images of the planet's mysterious hexagon-shaped jetstream in early December 2016.

The hexagon was discovered in images taken by the Voyager spacecraft in the early 1980s. It's estimated to have a diameter wider than two Earths. Scientists are still trying to figure out what causes it. Cassini was launched in 1997 and is beginning the end of its mission. The probe will dive into Saturn's atmosphere on September 15, 2017, sending back data until its signal is lost. Hide Caption 3 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe A dead star gives off a greenish glow in this Hubble Space Telescope image of the Crab Nebula, located about 6,500 light years from Earth in the constellation Taurus. NASA released the image for Halloween 2016 and played up the theme in its press release. The agency said the "ghoulish-looking object still has a pulse." At the center of the Crab Nebula is the crushed core, or "heart" of an exploded star. The heart is spinning 30 times per second and producing a magnetic field that generates 1 trillion volts, NASA said.

Hide Caption 4 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe Peering through the thick dust clouds of the galactic bulge an international team of astronomers has revealed the unusual mix of stars in the stellar cluster known as Terzan 5. The new results indicate that Terzan 5 is one of the bulge's primordial building blocks, most likely the relic of the very early days of the Milky Way. Hide Caption 5 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe An artist's conception of Planet Nine, which would be the farthest planet within our solar system. The similar cluster orbits of extreme objects on the edge of our solar system suggest a massive planet is located there. Hide Caption 6 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe An illustration of the orbits of the new and previously known extremely distant Solar System objects. The clustering of most of their orbits indicates that they are likely be influenced by something massive and very distant, the proposed Planet X. Hide Caption 7 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe Say hello to dark galaxy Dragonfly 44. Like our Milky Way, it has a halo of spherical clusters of stars around its core.

Hide Caption 8 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe A classical nova occurs when a white dwarf star gains matter from its secondary star (a red dwarf) over a period of time, causing a thermonuclear reaction on the surface that eventually erupts in a single visible outburst. This creates a 10,000-fold increase in brightness, depicted here in an artist's rendering. Hide Caption 9 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe Gravitational lensing and space warping are visible in this image of near and distant galaxies captured by Hubble. Hide Caption 10 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe At the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, researchers discovered an X-shaped structure within a tightly packed group of stars. Hide Caption 11 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe Meet UGC 1382: What astronomers thought was a normal elliptical galaxy (left) was actually revealed to be a massive disc galaxy made up of different parts when viewed with ultraviolet and deep optical data (center and right). In a complete reversal of normal galaxy structure, the center is younger than its outer spiral disk.

Hide Caption 12 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the Crab Nebula and its "beating heart," which is a neutron star at the right of the two bright stars in the center of this image. The neutron star pulses 30 times a second. The rainbow colors are visible due to the movement of materials in the nebula occurring during the time-lapse of the image. Hide Caption 13 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe The Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of a hidden galaxy that is fainter than Andromeda or the Milky Way. This low surface brightness galaxy, called UGC 477, is over 110 million light-years away in the constellation of Pisces. Hide Caption 14 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe On April 19, NASA released new images of bright craters on Ceres. This photo shows the Haulani Crater, which has evidence of landslides from its rim. Scientists believe some craters on the dwarf planet are bright because they are relatively new.

Hide Caption 15 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe This illustration shows the millions of dust grains NASA's Cassini spacecraft has sampled near Saturn. A few dozen of them appear to have come from beyond our solar system. Hide Caption 16 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe This image from the VLT Survey Telescope at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile shows a stunning concentration of galaxies known as the Fornax Cluster, which can be found in the Southern Hemisphere. At the center of this cluster, in the middle of the three bright blobs on the left side of the image, lies a cD galaxy -- a galactic cannibal that has grown in size by consuming smaller galaxies. Hide Caption 17 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, using infrared technology, reveals the density of stars in the Milky Way . According to NASA, the photo -- stitched together from nine images -- contains more than a half-million stars. The star cluster is the densest in the galaxy. Hide Caption 18 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe This image shows the central region of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

The young and dense star cluster R136, which contains hundreds of massive stars, is visible in the lower right of the image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Hide Caption 19 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe In March 2016, astronomers published a paper on powerful red flashes coming from binary system V404 Cygni in 2015. This illustration shows a black hole, similar to the one in V404 Cygni, devouring material from an orbiting star. Hide Caption 20 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe A new map of the Milky Way was released February 24, 2016, giving astronomers a full census of the star-forming regions within our own galaxy. The APEX telescope in Chile captured this survey. Hide Caption 21 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe This image shows the elliptical galaxy NGC 4889, deeply embedded within the Coma galaxy cluster. There is a gigantic supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy.

Hide Caption 22 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe An artist's impression of 2MASS J2126, which takens 900,000 years to orbit its star, 1 trillion kilometers away. Hide Caption 23 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe Caltech researchers have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system. The object, nicknamed Planet Nine, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune. Hide Caption 25 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe Astronomers noticed huge waves of gas being "burped" by the black hole at the center of NGC 5195, a small galaxy 26 million light years from Earth. The team believes the outburst is a consequence of the interaction of NGC 5195 with a nearby galaxy. Hide Caption 26 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe An artist's illustration shows a binary black hole found in the quasar at the center of the Markarian 231 galaxy.

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope discovered the galaxy being powered by two black holes "furiously whirling about each other," the space agency said in a news release. Hide Caption 27 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe An artist's impression of what a black hole might look like. In February, researchers in China said they had spotted a super-massive black hole 12 billion times the size of the sun. Hide Caption 28 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe Are there are oceans on any of Jupiter's moons? The Juice probe shown in this artist's impression aims to find out. Picture courtesy of ESA/AOES Hide Caption 29 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe Astronomers have discovered powerful auroras on a brown dwarf that is 20 light-years away. This is an artist's concept of the phenomenon. Hide Caption 30 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe Venus, bottom, and Jupiter shine brightly above Matthews, North Carolina, on Monday, June 29. The apparent close encounter, called a conjunction, has been giving a dazzling display in the summer sky.

Although the two planets appear to be close together, in reality they are millions of miles apart. Hide Caption 31 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe Jupiter's icy moon Europa may be the best place in the solar system to look for extraterrestrial life, according to NASA. The moon is about the size of Earth's moon, and there is evidence it has an ocean beneath its frozen crust that may hold twice as much water as Earth. NASA's 2016 budget includes a request for $30 million to plan a mission to investigate Europa. The image above was taken by the Galileo spacecraft on November 25, 1999. It's a 12-frame mosaic and is considered the the best image yet of the side of Europa that faces Jupiter. Hide Caption 32 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe This nebula, or cloud of gas and dust, is called RCW 34 or Gum 19. The brightest areas you can see are where the gas is being heated by young stars. Eventually the gas burst outward like champagne after a bottle is uncorked. Scientists call this champagne flow.

This new image of the nebula was captured by the European Space Organization's Very Large Telescope in Chile. RCW 34 is in the constellation Vela in the southern sky. The name means "sails of a ship" in Latin. Hide Caption 33 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe The Hubble Space Telescope captured images of Jupiter's three great moons -- Io, Callisto, and Europa -- passing by at once. Hide Caption 34 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe A massive galaxy cluster known as SDSS J1038+4849 looks like a smiley face in an image captured by the Hubble Telescope. The two glowing eyes are actually two distant galaxies. And what of the smile and the round face? That's a result of what astronomers call "strong gravitational lensing." That happens because the gravitational pull between the two galaxy clusters is so strong it distorts time and space around them. Hide Caption 35 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe Using powerful optics, astronomers have found a planet-like body, J1407b, with rings 200 times the size of Saturn's.

This is an artist's depiction of the rings of planet J1407b, which are eclipsing a star. Hide Caption 36 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe A patch of stars appears to be missing in this image from the La Silla Observatory in Chile. But the stars are actually still there behind a cloud of gas and dust called Lynds Dark Nebula 483. The cloud is about 700 light years from Earth in the constellation Serpens (The Serpent). Hide Caption 37 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe This is the largest Hubble Space Telescope image ever assembled. It's a portion of the galaxy next door, Andromeda (M31). Hide Caption 38 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe NASA has captured a stunning new image of the so-called "Pillars of Creation," one of the space agency's most iconic discoveries. The giant columns of cold gas, in a small region of the Eagle Nebula, were popularized by a similar image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995.

Hide Caption 39 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe Astronomers using the Hubble Space pieced together this picture that shows a small section of space in the southern-hemisphere constellation Fornax. Within this deep-space image are 10,000 galaxies, going back in time as far as a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Hide Caption 40 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe Planetary nebula Abell 33 appears ring-like in this image, taken using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. The blue bubble was created when an aging star shed its outer layers and a star in the foreground happened to align with it to create a "diamond engagement ring" effect. Hide Caption 41 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe This long-exposure image from the Hubble Telescope is the deepest-ever picture taken of a cluster of galaxies. The cluster, called Abell 2744, contains several hundred galaxies as they looked 3.5 billion years ago; the more distant galaxies appear as they did more than 12 billion years ago, not long after the Big Bang.

Hide Caption 42 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe NASA's NuSTAR telescope array generated the first map of radioactivity in the remnants of an exploding star, or supernova. Blue in this image of Cassiopeia A represents radioactive material. Hide Caption 43 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe A supernova was spotted on January 21 in Messier 82, one of the nearest big galaxies. This wide view image was taken on January 22. Hide Caption 44 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe The M82 supernova, seen here, has been designated SN2014J because it is the 10th supernova detected in 2014. At 11.4 million light years from Earth, it is the closest Type Ia supernova recorded since systematic studies with telescopes began in the 1930s. Hide Caption 45 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe Is that a giant hand waving at us? Actually, it's what's left of a star that died and exploded a long time ago.

Astronomers nicknamed it the "Hand of God." NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR , took this image in high-energy X-rays, shown in blue. The image was combined with images from another space telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Hide Caption 46 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, one of the largest and closest galaxies of its kind. The center of the galaxy is mysterious , researchers say, because it has a double nucleus -- a supermassive black hole that may be ringed by a lopsided disc of stars, giving it the appearance of a dual core. Hide Caption 47 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe Hubble scientists say this is the best-ever view of the Tarantula Nebula, which is located in one of our closest galactic neighbors, the Large Magellanic Cloud. Hide Caption 48 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe Those spots on our sun appear small, but even a moderate-sized spot is about as big as Earth .

They occur when strong magnetic fields poke through the sun's surface and let the area cool in comparison to the surrounding area. Hide Caption 49 of 50 Photos: Wonders of the universe This Hubble image looks a floating marble or a maybe a giant, disembodied eye. But it's actually a nebula with a giant star at its center. Scientists think the star used to be 20 times more massive than our sun, but it's dying and is destined to go supernova. Hide Caption

Question: A new ring was discovered around which planet in 2009?
Answer: Saturn