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 a power law with the index "p" = 2.5 ± 0.5. In addition to separate dust bands the system of Uranian rings appears to be immersed into wide and faint sheet of dust with the normal optical depth not exceeding 10. In 2003–2005, the Hubble Space Telescope detected a pair of previously unknown rings, now called the outer ring system, which brought the number of known Uranian rings to 13. These rings were subsequently named the μ and ν rings. The μ ring is the outermost of the pair, and is twice the distance from the planet as the bright