Newly-discovered planet has rings TWO HUNDRED TIMES BIGGER than those of Saturn

I won't apologize for the all-caps there.  I mean, we are talking about something of monstrous proportions here...

Four hundred-some light years away is the recently-discovered exoplanet J1407b.  Its parent star kept blinking in and out of view.  Astro-boffins went to work on the case, doing analysis of light patterns and spectroscopy and all kinds of stuff like that.

What they found is that J1407b, a young planet with about 40-50 Jupiter masses, boasts a massive, MASSIVE ring system.  One that is more than 200 times larger than the one Saturn has.

Here's what it might look like...

See that teeny dot?  That's meant to be J1407b.  Mind you, this is a planet already with 40 times more mass than Jupiter.  See those rings?  They're spread out over 120 million kilometers of diameter's worth of disk.

If J1407b was located where Saturn is in our solar system, not only would the ring system be very easily visible from the Earth, it would be significantly larger than the full Moon.

And yet, it's been calculated that this system of rings is made up of about the same amount of material as the Earth has.  Which is comparably small in the cosmic scheme of things.

Just when you think you can't imagine anything else, here is something confirming that, yes... there are things that we could not have imagined out there.

Mash here for more about J1407b, how it was discovered and all that jazz.

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Exoplanet observed orbiting star for first time

Apologies for the absence, dear readers. Of which no less than three of you have insisted today that I must return 'cuz apparently this blog has become a daily fixture in the lives of some! I shall endeavor to do better but what can I say? I'm a busy lad, with many irons in the fire. And Lord willing I'll get to begin sharing some of those sooner than later.

But first: yay for Beta Pictoris! For at least the past two and a half decades this has been a candidate star for having a planetary system. And now thanks to the European Southern Observatory's honkin'-big 8.2 meter Very Large Telescope, we've got the first observation of an extra-solar planet orbiting a star (namely, Beta Pictoris).

Click to enjoy an extra-huge aperture of astronomical goodness!

Click on the above link for better explanation about how neat this is. And thanks to Shane Thacker for finding this story.

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First surface map of an extra-solar planet

The first map of the surface of a planet outside our solar system has been produced. This is a temperature-variation map of HD 189733b, orbiting a star about 63 light years from Earth. HD 189733b is considered a "hot Jupiter": a gas giant that orbits extremely close to its parent star (like, closer than Mercury does to our Sun). The map was produced with observations from the Spitzer Space Telescope. Click here for more info.

Absolutely amazing. It wasn't that long ago that we only suspected that there were planets orbiting other stars. In just a few years we've catalogued hundreds of new planets and now we've arrived at where we can get a picture of a planet's surface. Who knows what kinds of things we'll be picking out of the sky in another 10 or 20 years.

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