[I'm trying to catch up with all the news that's been released this week while I was off lecturing in Texas. This is Part 2 of a few articles just about exoplanets. Part 1 was posted earlier.]
Astronomers have found one of the most interesting exoplanets yet: one with a very extended ring system!
[That's an artist's impression of the system; click to encronosate.] 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. The planet and its rings were discovered using the transit method: looking for small ...
