Researchers discovered the largest ring system ever seen outside of our solar system.
The ring system, which eclipses the Sun-like star J1407, is believed to be even heavier than what is seen on Saturn, the University of Rochester reported. It consists of over 30 rings that are tens of millions of kilometers in diameter. The team also found gaps in the rings in which satellite moons may have formed.
"The details that we see in the light curve are incredible. 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," said Leiden's Matthew 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. If we could replace Saturn's rings with the rings around J1407b, they would be easily visible at night and be many times larger than the full moon."
The planet that hosts the rings is believed to be even larger that Jupiter, and its rings are about 200 times larger than what is seen on our own Saturn. To make their findings, the researchers used data from the SuperWASP project, which detects gas giants as they orbit their parent stars.
"The planetary science community has theorized for decades that planets like Jupiter and Saturn would have had, at an early stage, disks around them that then led to the formation of satellites," said co-author Mamajek, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester."However, until we discovered this object in 2012, no-one had seen such a ring system. This is the first snapshot of satellite formation on million-kilometer scales around a substellar object."
The findings were reported in a recent edition of the Astrophysical Journal.
