But as usual, looking at exoplanets beyond our Solar System opens up new theories in planetary science. Researchers Steven Rieder and Matthew Kenworthy observed a star 420 light-years away.

S. Charnoz, R. M. Canup, A. Crida, L. Dones(Submitted on 28 Mar 2017) This chapter of the book Planetary Ring Systems addresses the origin of planetary rings, one of the […] ...

Most gas planets have some type of ring system, but worlds such as Saturn have a large opaque ring system. If the rings block starlight as well as the planet, astronomers might overestimate the ...

Just on the outskirts of our solar system exists the dwarf planet Quaoar, and recent observations of the planet found a dense ring around it, but scientists can't figure how – or why – it's ...

On their way to a colony planet around Proxima Centauri b, roughly 4.2 light years from Earth, the crew of the Ark One suffers a species-threatening catastrophe while still a year away from their ...

An extrasolar planetary ring system discovered in 2012 has now been determined to be much more massive than the one orbiting Saturn. Michelle Starr Science editor Michelle Starr is CNET's science ...

The ring in question orbits Quaoar, a small dwarf planet that lies more than 4 billion miles from the sun—roughly 44 times the distance between Earth and our star.

A dwarf planet called 50000 Quaoar that orbits beyond Neptune appears to have a ring that shouldn't be there, at 7.4 times more distant than the planet's radius.

In a surprising twist on our planet’s ancient history, scientists are now suggesting that Earth might once have had a ring system, similar to the rings we see around Saturn today. A new study ...

Ring systems are relatively rare in the Solar System, and as well as those around Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, only two minor planets possess rings – Chariklo and Haumea.

Saturn’s rings have never completely disappeared (though they might in the next few hundred million years). The planet’s ring system extends up to 175,000 miles from Saturn’s surface, ...