Exoplanet with Rings Discovered

What? It most certainly hasn't been two months since the last post, what are you talking about?

And you thought these rings were impressive.

Anyway,  scientists found an exoplanet orbiting the star 1SWASP J140747.93-394542.6 (what a catchy name) a few years back. Nothing unusual about that, but after a closer look, things got a bit baffling. Ordinarily, when a planet transits in front of a star, the star dims once, and then brightens again. Old J1407, as I am henceforth calling, was not dimming like that. It would dim and brighten many times in succession. They figured out it was a ring system orbiting the planet, J1407b, back in 2012, but at the time, they thought there were only 4 rings.

As it turned out, they slightly underestimated. Apparently this planet has 37 rings, with a radius of 0.6 AU. That means Earth's entire orbit would fit with this ring system. They have an estimated mass of 100 times the mass of the moon, and a gap 0.4 AU out is big enough that a Mars or even Earth-sized object could be orbiting inside. It should be noted that this planet is very young, less than 20 million years, and these rings are not going to last long. Astronomically long, that is. Eventually, those rings will disappear as moons appear, but with that much mass contained in the rings, there could be some pretty big moons. The planet's a bit too far out for any Earth-sized moon to be potentially habitable, which is too bad, but the idea of seeing a ring system that ridiculously oversized would probably make J1407b quite the tourist destination. Now, all we need is interstellar travel...

New Horizons and Orion

On their own, I'm not sure either of these stories are worth a post, so I'll go ahead and combine them.

The New Horizons space probe woke up from a long hibernation this weekend. It's on it's way to Pluto, and will fly by on July 14, 2015. It will be, of course, the first spacecraft to visit Pluto, and the first to obtain any sort of detailed image. Even the most advanced telescopes on Earth or in orbit can barely make out any detail. That's definitely something to look forward to this summer.

In a follow-up to my last post, the Orion spacecraft, NASA's new manned crew capsule, underwent a successful first test launch a couple of days ago. I have to confess, given how many rockets have exploded during launch recently, I was a little worried about Orion. I'm not sure the manned space program could take a setback like that. Orion needs to work, and it needs to work well. At least it's gotten through it's first test just fine.

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