The Moon slides by Saturn the next couple of nights. The planet looks like a bright star. It’s to the left of the Moon as night falls this evening, and to the lower right of the Moon tomorrow night.

Saturn is best known for its rings. They’re almost wide enough to span the distance from Earth to the Moon. Right now, we’re viewing them almost edge-on, so they look like a thin line across the planet’s disk.

Saturn isn’t the only world with rings. The solar system’s three other giant outer planets also have them. But they’re dark and thin, so they’re hard to see. Several asteroids and dwarf planets have rings, too. But the biggest set of rings yet seen may encircle a “rogue” planet about 450 light-years away.

The possible rings were discovered years ago. Over a period of eight weeks, the light of a star in Centaurus flickered – sometimes dropping to just five percent of its normal level. The most likely cause was the passage of a set of rings in front of the star. And it’s quite a set. The rings are more than a hundred million miles across – greater than the distance from Earth to the Sun.

The ringed planet appears to be traveling through the galaxy alone, and it just happened to pass in front of the star. It could be up to six times the mass of Jupiter, the giant of our own solar system. And moons could be orbiting inside the rings – the most impressive rings we’ve seen anywhere in the galaxy.

Script by Damond Benningfield