“Think of it as kind of a super Saturn.” That’s how University of Rochester astronomer Eric Mamajek described the ring system of exoplanet J1407b, which a recent analysis revealed is 200 times larger than that of the ringed planet in our solar system.

When Mamajek and colleagues discovered J1407b and its rings in 2012, the first such finding beyond the Milky Way, they didn’t yet know the extent of what they had found. “It took us a year even to convince ourselves of what we were seeing,” Mamajek told Michael Lemonick writing for Time magazine.

Now the team, lead by Matthew Kenworthy from the Leiden Observatory in The Netherlands, understands that more than 30 rings, each measuring tens of millions of miles in diameter, surround J1407. “If you put these rings in our own solar system, they’d stretch all the way from the Earth to the Sun, a distance of 93 million miles,” Lemonick writes.

The research team plans to publish its findings in the Astrophysical Journal.

Despite the enormity of the rings, “the star is much too far away to observe the rings directly,” Kentworthy said in a news release. So to draw their conclusions, the researchers created a detailed model then studied the light patterns. They also looked at data from something called the SuperWASP project, a survey that can “detect exoplanets as they cross in front of their parent stars, causing the light from them to dim,” reports BBC News.

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They noticed the light dimmed for two months rather than a few hours. From there, they determined the rings’ massive size and the fact that exomoons — moons or satellites that orbit planets past our sun — may have formed. “If we could replace Saturn’s rings with the rings around J1407b, they would be easily visible at night and be many times larger than the full moon,” Kentworthy added.

Part of Kentworthy and Mamajek’s hypothesis says that as these rings thin during the next several million years, they’ll break away and form exomoons. But to date, no exomoons have actually been discovered, according to The Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler Project out of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. So the idea that some of the basis for ring size relates to exomoons gives some in the astronomy community pause.

So far, no other explanations have been posited, and the researchers plan to continue monitoring J1407, asking amateur astronomers to report to the American Association of Variable Star Observers their observations of this mysterious exoplanet.

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The ESO 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla observatory in Chile, during observations. (ESO/S. Brunier)