Behold the rings of Jupiter - that's right, we said Jupiter!
By Eddie Wrenn|
It is probably one of the least-known factos ofo ur solar system - but Jupiter has a ring system.
Yes, the giant gas planet, the biggest planet in our system, has rings, which were first discovered in 1979 by the passing Voyager 1 spacecraft - which, 33 years later, is making its own voyage of discovery on the very edge of the solar system.
Data from the Galileo spacecraft that orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003 later confirmed that these rings were created by meteoroid impacts on small nearby moons.
As a small meteoroid strikes tiny Adrastea, for example, it will bore into the moon, vaporise and explode dirt and dust off into a Jovian orbit.
This is it: The rings are shown in profile, created by small meteorite impacts on the moons of Jupiter
The rings are not as well-known as Saturn and Uranus, partly because not many photographs of them exist.
The system is mainly composed of dust - caused by the collisions of meteorites on Jupiter's moons, and dust escaping from one of Jupiter's 60-plus moons, and the rings are probably as old as Jupiter.
Intriguingly, one of the moons of Jupiter, called S/2000 and about four kilometres in diameter, appears to have gone missing since it was first spotted in 2000. It is possible it crashed into a larger moon Himalia at 170 kilometres in diameter, and may have created its own ring.
The moons of Jupiter, with the rings circling in the same plane
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