Scientists have discovered a super-Saturn with super rings

When Eric Mamajek, an astronomer from the University of Rochester, told his friends about his discovery to scientists, they simply did not believe it. And the discovery was to discover an interesting planet that is 430 light years away from Earth. The diameter of the planet is several dozen times larger than the diameter of Saturn or Jupiter, but even this is not the most interesting.

The most interesting object here are the rings of the planet - their diameter is 200 times the diameter of the rings of Saturn. In addition, this planet has satellites, at least one satellite, the size of the Earth.

Super rings and a giant planet were discovered by Eric after analyzing documents from the SuperWASP project. Scientists have discovered some oddity: when the planet passed in front of its star, the luminosity of the star did not decrease for several hours (as usually happens in such cases) but for two months. At the same time, the luminosity of the star changed - it increased, then decreased again.
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It is clear that experts are interested in such a strange feature of the object J1407b, and tried to understand why this is happening. On mature reflection, the scientists decided that this planet has an extremely large ring system, much more extensive than Saturn.



Interestingly, the star around which the super-Saturn rotates is very young, only 16 million years old. Compared to our Sun, which is more than 4.6 billion years old, this star is just a baby. If scientists are right in their assumptions that after some time the system of rings will begin to decrease, and the material of which this system consists will go to the formation of satellites of the planet.

Some scientists doubt the conclusions of Eric, and doubts could be dispelled if someone else had observed a similar phenomenon (closing the disk of a star by a planet with rings), but so far this has not happened. It remains only to wait until the planet passes again in front of the star's disk - perhaps its orbit is quite large, and there is a probability that the time for a complete revolution is 10-15 years.

Now astronomers hope to get information from their colleagues on similar cases in other star systems - when a star starts to change its luminosity for no apparent reason, reducing it many times over a long time.