SCIENTISTS HAVE discovered a giant ring around Saturn, the biggest yet discovered in the solar system.

The “supersized ring”, as it being called by the scientists from the University of Virginia who discovered it, is so big it would span the width of two full moons worth of sky if you could see it from Saturn.

Saturn’s rings were first discovered almost exactly 400 years ago by Galileo Galilei and are visible with even the smallest telescopes, but this ring is only visible in the infra-red light and was first spotted by Nasa’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

It is about 10 times the diameter of Saturn and orbits at a distance of eight million kilometres from the planet.

It covers a volume of space which would contain a billion Earths though it is made of an extremely tenuous film of dust from Phoebe, one of Saturn’s outer moons.