Exoplanet news Part 2: Exosaturn!

Exoplanet news Part 2: Exosaturn!

Exoplanet news Part 2: Exosaturn!

Bad Astronomy
The entire universe in blog form
Jan. 12 2012 10:03 AM

Exoplanet news Part 2: Exosaturn!



Phil Plait Phil Plait




The planet was discovered with the SuperWASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) telescopes -- a UK project that employs low-magnification but very sensitive cameras which can observe large areas of the sky at the same time. It orbits a young star called 1SWASP J140747.93-394542.6, which is 420 light years away. The star's youth -- 16 million years -- indicates that the rings are probably the leftover remnants from when the planet formed.



But this planet took nearly two months to transit the star! And the dip was weird: there were multiple times the star dimmed then got brighter again, at one point having 95% of its light blocked. Even though the planet wasn't seen directly, the most obvious explanation is a ring system similar to Saturn's (though much larger), blocking the light. It must have gaps in the rings, like Saturn's do, to explain the starlight jumping up again over time. Overall, four rings were detected, and they stretch tens of millions kilometers in diameter!

Saturn's ring are only about 300,000 km across, so clearly this planet must be much more massive than Saturn, and the rings denser. It may be a little unfair to compare it to Saturn at all; it's more like a super-Jupiter still surrounded by primordial debris. Unfortunately, we don't know how massive the planet itself is; you need Doppler data for that and none has been taken yet. The astronomers who discovered this system, of course, are looking into obtaining Doppler data. It's even possible the object is so large it's actually a brown dwarf and not a planet.

Perhaps most intriguing about all this are those gaps in the rings. The easiest way to explain them is that there are objects there, moons, sweeping out the material in the rings. Saturn's rings have gaps for this reason. In fact, there are hundreds of gaps in Saturn's rings! These are caused by resonances: if a ring particle orbits twice for every one time a moon orbits, for example, the moon's gravity tugs on it every time it swings by, pulling it into a different orbit. Over time, all the particles in that orbit are gone, leaving behind a gap.

If the planet itself is big, how big are those moons? Could one be Earth-sized? It's an idea that's been around awhile, but none has ever been seen... yet. All these super-Jupiters being found have a lot of gravity, and it's possible they have big moons. We're also getting better at detecting smaller objects, so it wouldn't surprise me if that announcement is made sometime relatively soon, too!


Image credit: Michael Osadciw/University of Rochester