Astronomers have recently discovered an exoplanet with an enormous ring system, making it the first planet found to share a ring system similar to Saturn's. According to National Geographic, the giant planet is currently called J1407B, and orbits a star located about 430 light-years from Earth.

The planet is indeed huge - it is between ten and 40 times as massive as Jupiter, and its rings are roughly 200 times the size of Saturn's rings. According to the Huffington Post, the ring system is believed to be made up of 37 rings, each of which measures tens of millions of miles in diameter. The system has a whopping diameter of approximately 75 million miles.

Astronomer Mark Pecaut first discovered it accidentally in 2011 while examining some young stars in a group known as the Scorpius-Centaurus Association.  One star in particular kept flickering, which led him to wonder whether a system of rings could be passing in front of the star. He and his fellow astronomers at the University of Rochester, New York spent a year examining the star, and announced their claim of a giant ring system in 2012.

Dr. Matthew Kenworthy, an astronomer at the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands and a member of the astronomy team, stated, "The star is much too far away to observe the rings directly, but we could make a detailed model based on the rapid brightness variations in the star light passing through the ring system."

 However, there is one potential problem. The star observed and everything orbiting it is relatively young at 16 million years old, which means that J1407B's rings could still condense into moons sometime soon. This is what occurred with Saturn in the early history of our own solar system.

But that doesn't mean astronomers are dismissing the giant ring system altogether. NASA astronomer Natalie Batalha stated, "It will be very interesting to see what picture forms as each new observation adds a new piece of the puzzle. This could indeed end up being the first ringed planet [found] outside our solar system."