Newly Found Exoplanet May Have Ring System Dwarfing Saturn’s

Scientific American ------ Although planetary rings are extremely common in our solar system—every gas giant circling our sun has one—they’ve proved harder to spot around worlds orbiting other stars. That’s a shame, because studies of ring systems around younger worlds could help clarify what the giant planets of our nearly five-billion-year-old solar system looked like in their first few million years. More than two decades of planet hunting have revealed just one ringed exoplanet—a super-size version of Saturn that researchers have only just begun to study using very large telescopes. But now they may have have found a second super-Saturn half-hidden in a disk of gas and dust surrounding a young star, a world readily observable even with backyard telescopes. A few years ago, astronomers affiliated with the Wide-Angle Search for Planets (WASP) survey spotted an unusual feature in the shadowy haze around the star called PDS 110. For nearly two years the puzzling detection sat on the desk of WASP team member Hugh Osborn, a graduate student at the University of Warwick in England who first noticed it. “I wasn’t really sure what it could be,” Osborn says. Then, at a conference years later, another astronomer noted the same blip had appeared in data on PDS 110’s disk from a different survey and instrument, entirely independent Osborn’s original detection. At that point, “it became clear it was a bit more interesting than I originally thought,” he says. A paper detailing the research has been accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. To learn more click on the picture below to read the article.