Scientists accurately determined how big Saturn's most recently discovered ring is, confirming no other in solar system is larger.
According to CBS News, authors of a study published in the journal Nature were able to image the giant ring for the first time. For their work, the astronomers used data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft.
First discovered in 2009, they named the ring after Phoebe, one of Saturn's most distant moons, because they share compositional similarities.
"We knew it was the biggest ring, but know we find it's even bigger than we thought, new and improved," study lead author Douglas Hamilton, a planetary scientist at the University of Maryland, told Space.com. "It's fascinating that this ring can exist.
"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."
The researchers said Saturn now owns the two largest rings in the solar system, with their subject being outsizing the planet's E Ring 10 times over. The newly crowned largest ring is also estimated to be 270 times the size of Saturn.
"I constructed theoretical models for how the dust particles of different sizes would move and then I constructed artificial rings. What would the ring look like if it were made only of large particles? What would it look like with only small particles? What about a mixture?" Hamilton told CBS News. "The data is good enough to constrain those models so we rule out the possibility of the ring being composed entirely of large particles. The smallest ones seem to be responsible for something like 90 percent of the light or more."
