Exoplanet J1407b is much larger than Jupiter, has rings that dwarf Saturn’s

The exoplanet J1407 is almost unimaginably large by the standards of our solar system. According to researchers it is likely somewhere between 10 and 40 times the mass of Jupiter. However, that is not the really spectacular thing about it.

According to research recently published in the Astrophysics Journal from astronomers at the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands and the University of Rochester, the planet has a ring system that dwarfs that of Saturn. Their research indicates that the planet has 30 massive rings, each tens of millions of kilometers in diameter which can block out the light from the planets sun for days at a time.

The team also found gaps in the rings where examines 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. 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,” said Kenworthy in a statement.

The planet, the first outside our solar system known to have a ring system, was discovered in 2012 by a team led by Rochester’s Eric Mamajek using data from data from the SuperWASP project. That project was designed to detect gas giants as they move in front of their parent star. The team noticed that the planet in question had unusual eclipses and proposed the idea that they were caused by disks around a large planet or brown dwarf.

“This planet is much larger than Jupiter or Saturn, and its ring system is roughly 200 times larger than Saturn’s rings are today. You could think of it as kind of a super Saturn,” said co-author Mamajek, professor of physics and astronomy at Rochester.

More recent research led by Kenworthy used adaptive optics and Doppler spectroscopy to estimate the object’s mass. Based on their own data as well as previous observations was that it was an enormous planet with a ring system responsible for dimming the light of its sun J1407.

The light curve made by the planet passing in front of its star shows that the ring systems diameter is almost 75 million miles, which is more than 200 times the diameter of sauternes rings. Researchers estimate that the rings contain dust particles roughly equal in mass to the Earth.

“If you were to grind up the four large Galilean moons of Jupiter into dust and ice and spread out the material over their orbits in a ring around Jupiter, the ring would be so opaque to light that a distant observer that saw the ring pass in front of the sun would see a very deep, multi-day eclipse. In the case of J1407, we see the rings blocking as much as 95 percent of the light of this young Sun-like star for days, so there is a lot of material there that could then form satellites,” said Mamajek.

The researchers found a clean gap in the rings which they believe could indicate the formation of a satellite or moon. Over the next several million years, astronomers expect that the rings will thin out and possibly disappear as new moons are formed around the planet.

“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. 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,” says Mamajek.

The researchers estimate that the massive planet, with its rings in tow, takes roughly a decade to orbit its sun. Kenworthy adds that observing objects like J1407b is the only way to observe early satellite formations around planets.

The researchers urge amateur astronomers to help monitor J1407 which will help to detect the next eclipse of the rings so that astronomers can further research the planet. Observations can be reported to the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO).

While they wait for that next opportunity for observation, the researchers are looking for similar phenomenon elsewhere in the galaxy.

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