Rings of Neptune 1846 when William Lassell, the discoverer of Neptune's largest moon, Triton, thought he had seen a ring around the planet. However, his claim was never confirmed and it is likely that it was an observational artifact. The first reliable detection of a ring was made in 1968 by stellar occultation, although that result would go unnoticed until 1977 when the rings of Uranus were discovered. Soon after the Uranus discovery, a team from Villanova University led by Harold J. Reitsema began searching for rings around Neptune. On 24 May 1981, they detected a dip in a star's brightness during one
Rings of Uranus more than 600 million years old. The Uranian ring system probably originated from the collisional fragmentation of several moons that once existed around the planet. After colliding, the moons probably broke up into many particles, which survived as narrow and optically dense rings only in strictly confined zones of maximum stability. The mechanism that confines the narrow rings is not well understood. Initially it was assumed that every narrow ring had a pair of nearby shepherd moons corralling them into shape. In 1986 "Voyager 2" discovered only one such shepherd pair (Cordelia and Ophelia) around the brightest ring (ε). The