Astronomers in the United States have discovered a colossal new dust ring around the planet Saturn.
It extends about 13 million kilometres from Saturn, about 50 times further out into space than the planet's more familiar rings, the BBC reports.
The tenuous ring is probably made up of debris kicked off Saturn's moon Phoebe by small impacts, the scientist have told the journal Nature.
They think the dust then migrates towards the planet where it is picked up by another Saturnian moon, Iapetus.
The more easily visible outlier in Saturn's famous bands of ice and dust is its E-ring, which encompasses the orbit of the moon Enceladus. This circles the planet at a distance of just 240,000km.
The newly identified dust ring is not much broader and further out, and tilted at an angle of 27 degrees to the plane on which the more traditional rings sit.
