Astronomers are reporting they have discovered the first ringed planet outside the Earth’s solar system. It is considered to be a great world with a sash of halos that are around 200 times the size of Saturn’s.
The planet has been labeled J1407b and it has a disk of about 30 rings which end up being so large that had they wrapped around Saturn, they would have dominated Earth’s night sky, according to ABC News. Dr. Matthew Kenworthy, who is an astronomer at the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, said the halo is enormous. Anyone on Earth would be able to easily view the rings and gaps between them if they were around Saturn. It would be many times larger than the full moon.
Professor Kenworthy and Dr. Eric Mamajec, who is employed at New York University probed through a databank of millions of stars that had been photographed by telescopes all over the Earth in an exoplanet exploration project known as Super WASP.
In performing this information hunt about the exoplanet, it required each man to take on a brand new type of thinking. They had to tell themselves that when they each first saw J1407b that they were looking at a huge halo planet. They first considered it to be an absurd idea, something that was totally i
Exoplanets, which are planets that exist outside of the Earth’s solar system, are able to be observed from the Earth through variations in the vividness of their main star. Light is moderately obstructed, usually for a few hours, when the planet moves between the central star and Earth.
Astronomers began gathering information on the planet’s personal star, J1407, between 2005, 2007, and about 2009, the researchers noticed that the light curve began going crazy. It suddenly started twinkling and flickering like mad. Dr. Kenworthy exclaimed that the sight was extremely strange and was not like anything that anyone had seen before.
His group of examiners concluded the only explanation they could come up with was a massive disk of space rings was circling a planet that had moved between Earth and J1407, therefore obstructing the star’s light in spurts. It was the very first time that anyone had seen such a colossal ring arrangement outside the solar system, in fact any kind of ring structure around what is considered a planet.
The research team has written up a report over the newly discovered planet that has been accepted for publication by the Astrophysical Journal. It is believed that the rings start at a distance of around 30 million kilometers from the planet and move out to approximately 90 million kilometers. It is also thought that they are most likely made up of dust, because planet J1407b is around 1,000 to 2,000 degrees Celsius, therefore much too hot to support ice rings such as those surrounding Saturn.
It is also believed that the planet is probably about 20 to 40 times the mass of Jupiter and is about 16 million years old. That makes it a baby when speaking in stellar age terms. Both the Earth and Sun are 4.5 billion years old.
If it turns out that the astronomers’ hypothesis turns out to be correct and J1407b truly is a ring system, then this is the first direct evidence of such a process happening outside the Earth’s solar system.