An artist's depiction of what the massive of rings of J1407b might look like. Photo by Ron Miller/University of Rochester.
ROCHESTER, N.Y., Jan. 26 (UPI) -- A new study, published this week in the Astrophysical Journal, details a planet with rings that put the halos of Saturn and Jupiter to shame. The planet, dubbed J1407b, was first discovered in 2012 but was only recently studied in great detail.
"This planet is much larger than Jupiter or Saturn, and its ring system is roughly 200 times larger than Saturn's rings are today," study co-author Eric Mamajek, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester, explained in a press release. "You could think of it as kind of a super Saturn."
The massive rings are bigger and heavier, and scientists were able to detect gaps in the expansive disk, suggesting satellites (or exomoons) have formed and are now orbiting J1407b. The planet itself orbits a young star (J1407) that lies roughly 430 light years away from our solar system.
Scientists estimate that J1407b has a mass of 40 times that of Jupiter, while the mass of its ring system is the equivalent of a single Earth.
Researchers weren't actually able to see the exoplanet's ring system, but were able to detect them, using the same methods that astronomers use to locate new alien worlds -- by detecting light variation in stars as their planets orbit and eclipse them.
"The details that we see in the light curve are incredible," explained lead study author Matthew Kenworthy, an astronomer at the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands.
"The eclipse lasted for several weeks, but you see rapid changes on time scales of tens of minutes as a result of fine structures in the rings," added Kenworthy. "The star is much too far away to observe the rings directly, but we could make a detailed model based on the rapid brightness variations in the star light passing through the ring system."
Finding planets and proof of their ring systems is difficult. Telescopes are constantly pulling in data, but even with the help of algorithms, sorting through it all is a never-ending task. That's why astronomers like those at Rochester and Leiden continue to call on citizen scientists to help out.
Monitoring the eclipses of faraway stars, researcher say, "is the only feasible way we have of observing the early conditions of satellite formation for the near future."
