Jupiter has a system of rings, which consists of 3 major components. Also called the Jovian ring system, the rings of Jupiter are not as visible from the Earth as those of Saturn. The rings are extremely faint and are made mostly of dust. Having low albedo, the rings don’t reflect enough sunlight so it can be easily seen. Voyager 1, the first spacecraft sent in the attempt to learn if the rings exist, took the first photograph of the rings but the image was not clear enough. Voyager 2 flew to take more images and had to be positioned under the shadow of Jupiter while it faces the sun to get more defined shots of the rings. The images confirmed 3 rings. The Galileo spacecraft also explored the Jovian ring system and studies are still being conducted from Earth.

The innermost ring, called the Halo, was reported to be discovered in 1998. The discovery was new, although the rings of Jupiter were not the first rings revealed in the solar system. The Halo ring is torus or doughnut-shaped and contains unbelievably small particles, which are 100 times smaller than a unit of sand. Interestingly, it moves in the opposite direction of Jupiter’s rotation. It is 12,500 kilometers thick and 30,500 wide.

The outer edge of halo eventually merges into the inner edge of the second ring, which is called the Main ring. It is the brightest among all the Jovian rings. It is 7000 kilometers wide and quite thin. Both the Main ring and Halo are thought to have resulted from the dust coming from the small moons Adrastea and Metis, which orbits are contained inside the two inner rings. The Galileo spacecraft confirmed the details of the Main ring, which were only speculated using the images taken by Voyager.

The third part of the ring system consists of a pair of identical and fairly uniform rings. They are called the Gossamer rings. They cover the orbits of the moons Amalthea and Thebe. They are very broad and extraordinarily faint. The outermost part of the pair is the widest among all the Jovian rings at 97,000 kilometers. The images of the Gossamer rings taken during past explorations show that they are also made up of atomic particles. It was only during the Galileo spacecraft exploration that a clear image of the Gossamer rings was produced. Since the Gossamer rings are extremely diffused and thin, the image still had to be overexposed to make it well defined.

The dust particles that build up the ring system are believed to exist and stay in the rings for 100 to 1000 years. As some particles fall out of the system or get pulled by Jupiter’s magnetic field, the ring system gets replacement. Considering that Jupiter is a tremendously gigantic ball of magnet, passing micrometeors and other bodies constantly get attracted to its gravitational field and they eventually collide with the 4 inner moons that are bigger bodies that orbit around Jupiter. The collisions hurl out big amounts of dust, which afterwards deposit into the collection of dust in the rings.

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