Though many of us have seen the beautiful pictures of Saturn’s rings, they are not often discussed. What are these rings made of? Why are they so beautiful? Are there more out there somewhere?

Of course, scientists have answers to all of these questions, and some are quite surprising. The rings are made up of a mixture of rocks as well as dust and ice particles. The ice makes up the majority of the ring structure.

It is this unique structure that allows the rings to take on their characteristic shape and color. You do not have to travel far to find other examples of planetary rings; in fact, all four of the gaseous giant planets in our solar system have them.

This is one of those little known interesting facts. In fact, I won an argument about the fact that Jupiter had rings while I was in high school). The reason we don’t know about the rings is because the pictures don’t show them. This is because the rings of the other planets are very thin and thus don’t reflect enough light to be visible.

But this goes even deeper. We are just beginning to awaken to the many extra-solar planets in our universe: planets orbiting other stars, many times orbiting pairs or triplets of stars further out in the Milky Way and other galaxies. So do planets out their have rings as well? Or are we unique in that sense.

If this seems like a tremendously difficult question to answer, it is. We obviously are not capable (at least yet) of sending people or even satellites to explore these distant places, so how can we determine the answer?

Well this actually starts with a mystery. There is a set of two Earth based telescopes (one in each hemisphere) that constantly take data in order to find planets. They are part of a project code named SuperWasp. What these telescopes do is measure what are called the light curves of a star (simply a measure of the intensity of light coming from the star).

To find a planet, you simply watch and wait to see a dip in the light curve. That dip means that something was passing in front of the star, causing the intensity seen by our telescopes to decrease. It happens that there was a particular star being observed that had a very strange light curve, unlike the others. There was a very long period where the light dropped, but there were also several spikes that happened during that long period. At first, the scientists thought maybe there was something wrong with the telescope, but it worked just fine looking at the same star after this, so they ruled it out. Then they were able to rule out, one by one other possible causes such as a large cloud of dust or a black hole (because they would have seen a spike in different kinds of radiation but none of those spikes were observed). The scientists finally have concluded that this is the largest set of rings ever observed. In fact, the rings are more than 200 times larger than Saturn’s.

This leaves me with a final question: Are there other interesting structures are out there waiting to be discovered? Perhaps the launch of the Webb telescope will answer a small part of this question.