Saturn’s Largest Ring Found by Scientists and NASA Telescope

-- Scientists using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered the largest known ring around Saturn.

The nearly invisible sphere is made of ice and dust particles and lies at the outer edge of Saturn’s system, between 3.7 million miles (6 million kilometers) and 8.1 million miles from the planet, according to a statement on NASA’s Web site.

Astronomers Anne Verbiscer and Michael Skrutskie of the University of Virginia and Douglas Hamilton of the University of Maryland, used the Spitzer telescope to investigate whether Saturn moon Phoebe may be circling the planet in a belt of dust.

Phoebe, one of Saturn’s most-distant moons, orbits within the newly found ring and may be the source of its material, the space agency said. A NASA illustration shows Saturn as a small dot surrounded by the massive ring, which has a diameter equal to 300 Saturns lined up side by side.

Spitzer’s infrared camera spotted the glow of the band’s cool dust. The Spitzer telescope, launched in 2003, is currently 66 million miles from Earth in orbit around the sun.

A paper about the discovery by Verbiscer, Hamilton and Michael Skrutskie, will be published online tomorrow by the journal Nature.

Saturn, named for the Roman god of agriculture, is the second-largest planet in the solar system after Jupiter and is the sixth planet from the Sun. Its system of rings is made up of ice, rocky debris and dust. Its mass is 95 times that of the Earth.

To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Lysaght in London at