Astronomers Find Vast Ring System Eclipsing a Distant Star 85
Zothecula writes: Astronomers from the Leiden Observatory, Netherlands, and the University of Rochester, New York, have discovered a massive ring system obscuring the light of the young star J1407b. It is believed that the rings belong to a massive planet or possibly a brown dwarf, with an orbital period of roughly 10 years. The giant planet boasts a ring system around 200 times larger than that of Saturn, the only planet in our solar system hosting a ring system of its own."
Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune also have rings. (Score:5, Informative)
Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune also have rings, not just Saturn.
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Neither article makes this mistake; it must be the summary submitter.
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I heard the inflation of its space metric was driven by the introduction of a dark matter candidate.
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Maybe it should wipe out the Klingons, then.
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Every grammar school kid knows that the other gas giants also have (faint) ring systems. How did the submitter AND the Slashdot editor put such a ridiculous mistake on the front page of a nerd site? (Also this is kind of old news, widely reported last week).
You must be new here, welcome to slashdot.
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Slashdot under Dice Holdings is rather like a cleanroom under management of poo flinging monkeys
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And what makes you think it was a mistake?
80% of the comments are about the 'mistake' in the summary. The slashdot editors are probably playing 'made you look!' to drive up ad revenue.
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Just wondering if, as far as we know, only gas giants have rings?
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Rings need gravity to hold them in place, low temperature to stop them from dissipating and need to be far enough from the parent star not to be blown away. You also need a replenishing source of material otherwise the ring material will coalesce over time.
Maybe a rocky planet a few times bigger than earth could hold a ring made of the element mercury at a distance of from the sun as Mars.
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One of the items on the new horizons checklist is to see if Pluto has rings.
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One of the items on the new horizons checklist is to see if Pluto has rings.
Just a collar.
What's fascinating about Pluto is how it could capture so many satellites. The Pluto/Charon binary is not all that massive, and any passersbys are likely to have a relatively high speed. Looking for mpact craters might tell us more - some of the moons might be fragments from relatively recent collisions.
Re:Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune also have rings. (Score:4, Informative)
No, the centaur object Chariklo (an icy asteroid between Saturn and Uranus) was recently discovered (2013) to have a set of rings, and a few other objects in that size range are suspected to.
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Just wondering if, as far as we know, only gas giants have rings?
No [phys.org]
And to be pedantic, the ice giants have them too.
Re:Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune also have rings. (Score:4, Funny)
If only gas giants have rings . . . (Score:2)
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1. Uranus and Neptune are more properly termed ice giants than gas giants.
2. Two dwarf planets in our own solar system - Chariklo and Chiron - are believed to have rings. Its suspected that Phobos will one day turn into a ring around Mars.
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Wait, what? (Score:5, Informative)
Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune would like to have a word with you.
Planets with Rings [universetoday.com]
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How can the submitter get this very simple fact wrong, and how can the approver of the submission let it slip by?
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You must be new here.
Fact check the summary. (Score:1)
Last I checked all of the gas giants and ice giants have a ring system. Saturn's just happens to be particularly flashy.
Dyson sphere (Score:1)
Could it be a partial Dyson sphere, or a Dyson sphere under construction?
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you mean ringworld
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I like how Niven ripped off Halo for his books.
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No. A Dyson sphere is impractical and stupid.
No civilization smart enough to be able to build one would be dumb enough to actually do so.
Re:Dyson sphere (Score:5, Insightful)
Humanity is smart enough to do lots of great things and dumb enough to do a bunch of others. I'll bet other civilizations share the same traits.
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It would take more energy to build it and move the harnessed energy back (to the other solar system where you want it), than you would get out of it. Further, this is entirely unworkable on any realistic time schedule unless you could exceed the speed of light, at which point you wouldn't need a dyson sphere (or much of anything, really) because you'd have the ability to violate causality.
If you want it in same system, then you'll be blocking out your own star (or one of them) and utterly fucking your syst
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If you're willing to pay for it the Magratheans will probably build it for you.
Now, THERE's a tourist attraction... (Score:5, Interesting)
Since so many people have already stepped up to shame the submitter and editor about botching the ONE statement not drawn directly from the article...
I'll just say that I would love to see a night sky featuring this ring system at, oh, say, Jupiter's distance from Earth. It would appear several times larger than the full Moon, and many, many times brighter. Anybody want to cook up a rendering?
Re:Now, THERE's a tourist attraction... (Score:5, Informative)
Since so many people have already stepped up to shame the submitter and editor about botching the ONE statement not drawn directly from the article...
I'll just say that I would love to see a night sky featuring this ring system at, oh, say, Jupiter's distance from Earth. It would appear several times larger than the full Moon, and many, many times brighter. Anybody want to cook up a rendering?
This is stale news; the BBC covered it and included an artist's impression in this article [bbc.com] more than a week ago.
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Looking at the artist's rendering from the other posts. That is huge and would be so cool! If the axis was pointing at us, would the reflected sunlight cause massive temperature changes here? Would we all get a tan every 20 years as we pass through this "laser beam"?
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I was thinking along the lines of it being in place of Saturn. And looking at the artist's rendering, it is huge. Star light (in remote locations) is actually enough to make your way around at night. Moon light is almost like streetlights.
If this thing was in place of Saturn, and tilted like Uranus. Saturn is huge, at 200x that, that is a pretty big object that is relatively close. I suspect it would be the brightest thing at night and probably visible during the day too.
Thou you are right, being that
Details from Afar (Score:2)
I think it's cool that using the profile of the star brightness peaks and valleys as various parts of the ring eclipsed the star, one can reconstruct an approximation of what the rings actually look like.
Even though the planet is so very far away, there are various tricks to obtain details. Gravity lenses are another "trick of universe" to magnify distant objects that otherwise would be very obscure or invisible. The down-side is that one cannot really "aim" these tricks, but have to be lucky and/or patient
Ringworld - beware the Pak (Score:2)
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That was my first thought too, except the ring belongs to a planet (or brown dwarf, at best), not the primary star.
Plus, no matter how cool the Ringworld is as a feat of engineering, it would probably just end up inhabited by a bunch of stupid pre-Industrial savages. /mutters stupid Ringworld Throne...
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That's not how Slashdot is supposed to work :-)
Wow... (Score:1)
They should rename that star (Score:5, Funny)
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At first I thought that had to be a uranus joke...
Why add retarded statements? (Score:2)
"the only planet in our solar system hosting a ring".
Honestly you have to be pretty uninformed to think such a thing to start with. But it's a whole new level of stupidity to take that extra step to present your lack of education as a statement of fact.
If you type "planet ring" into google the quoted text at the top is:
"""
A planetary ring is a disk or ring of dust, moonlets, or other small objects orbiting a planet or similar body. The most notable planetary rings in the Solar System are those around Saturn
Artist's impression (Score:2)
I love that artist's impression. Have there ever been any giant ring systems like this in sci-fi? If not, there should be. Maybe when I get the funding for my re-imagining of Forbidden Planet...
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Ringworld et al. Halo et al
Those are "rings," but they're nothing to do with planetary rings like those around Saturn or this new world.
HALO! (Score:1)
Roche limit (Score:2)
Can the Roche limit of a planet be so big? I would expect this to coalesce into moons quite fast.
Or it might be a small black hole. They have quite big Roche limits.