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Originally Posted by Marshall Bennett
The story is vague about actually detecting it. They say they believe they've discovered rings through an eclipse of the parent star. Thus far, no planets outside our solar system have ever been directly observed because they're simply too small. Only the wobble of the star they orbit lets them know they exist.
Seems to me they're sort of jumping the gun saying they've discovered anything. The Brits tend to do that a lot, however.
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The rings were found in data gathered by the SuperWASP observatory, which can detect exoplanets as they cross in front of their parent stars, causing the light from them to dim.
In this case, the astronomers saw a complex series of deep eclipses lasting for 56 days. They think this is caused by a planet with a giant ring system blocking out light as it passes in front of the star J1407.
"The light curve from end-to-end took about two months, but we could see very rapid changes in the space of one night," lead author Dr Matthew Kenworthy, from the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, told BBC News.
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Basically, the same technique that discovered the rings around either Neptune or Uranus a few decades back.
P.S. It was Uranus in 1977: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rings_of_Uranus
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Last edited by DJofSD; 01-27-2015 at 03:46 PM.
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