Matthew Kenworthy
@futurebird ...and then the rings 'disappear' and we don't see them again.
I've talked to lots of other astronomers about J1407b and the reaction I get is "interesting, but is this the correct explanation?" and I shrug my shoulders and go "maaaaybe" - this is how science works. I have to wait for J1407b to cross our line of sight again (tricky, could be decades....) or find more of these systems - and that's what I'm doing. /5
Matthew Kenworthy
@futurebird so - here's a different system that looks like a giant ring that we discovered recently - click through to see the animation! https://kenworthy.space/projects/asassn21js/ I have about three more systems that look as if they have rings in them, but analysis is tricky and slow - so it goes! I'm very fortunate to be able to chase these things up, I think they're fascinating. Thanks for your interest! Cheers, Matt /fin
Matthew Kenworthy
@futurebird Hi! Original author here :) The artwork is a reasonably good rendering, but the planet is too big, the rings are really HUGE. In our paper, I worked out what each ring should look like, but because we only have one wavelength, the colour of the rings is a guess, so we guess they're grey like Saturn's rings /1 https://kenworthy.space/projects/j1407b/
Matthew Kenworthy
@futurebird ...but you ask, *could* it exist? Well, yes! But we're not sure for low long. I'll explain what I mean. If you have a planet orbiting around a star, both the star and the planet have gravity. If you put a small rock close to the planet, the planet's gravity dominates and the rock orbits the planet. Put the rock close to the star, and the star's gravity wins, and the rock orbits the star. /2
Matthew Kenworthy
@futurebird There's a sweet spot between the two where gravity is equal, called the Lagrange point, and the rock gets tugged all other the place and flies away. BUT, around the planet is a region where rocks will orbit stably around the planet - this is called the Hill sphere, and this means that you can have rings of rocks orbiting around the planet quite happily. Hill spheres for the gas planets in our solar system are HUGE, tens of milliions of km in diameter! /3
Matthew Kenworthy
@futurebird ...so YES you can have J1407b sized rings, not a problem :) BUT I mentioned time... and the problem with J1407b is that gravity between the bands of rocks in the rings wants to clump them up into moons, and once gravity gets a toe hold, it goes *fast* (well, not if you're a human, but yes for planets). If J1407b is a big ring system, we've caught it at a special time in its existence - given a few more million years, the rings will clump into exomoons /4
myrmepropagandist
Remember that planet with a ring system much bigger than itself? J1407b I think. Only, it's unclear if the renderings of it that came out when it was first discovered really do describe it well?
What I need to know is if such a thing *could* exist. Or was this idea just silly?
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.