Four panels showing a series of events in the saga of J1407b. Panel 1: 2007 - Transit A ringed planet transits across a star (or maybe something that looks like a star?) Panel 2: ~2012? - Attack! A giant hungry anglerfish appears behind the ringed planet. Apparently these anglerfish like to eat planets. Panel 3: 2017 - Swimming away Having eaten the planet (and its rings), the anglerfish swims away from J1407b. The glowing lure is labelled "ALMA object". Panel 4: 2024 - Lure switched off To better camouflage and avoid even worse predators, the anglerfish switches off its lure as it swims to the next planetary system.

No idea what's going on with elusive #exoring #J1407b but here's a possibility which I don't think has been entirely ruled out yet, which I call the "Dark Bramble hypothesis".

Light curve of Bojajian's star, showing no variability from 1920 to 1980.

Inverted photos of white on black images of GK Per, showing the expansion of a shell of ejected material over 1914 to 1953.

Astronomical photographic plates enable time domain science, including searches for transiting #exoring systems such as #J1407b, so I was happy to see Enke+ “Archives of Photographic PLates for Astronomical USE (APPLAUSE)" that includes a light curve for Boyajian’s star #astrodon 🪐🔭

Beyonce dancing in her iconic video "Single ladies" imploring all astronomers to put and exoring on it.

Instead we realised that 'if you like it, you should put an #exoring on it' and it became BeyonCE instead! /fin

Me dancing a happy supervisor dance (actually Napoleon Dynamite dancing, but you get my drift)

One student paper was ACCEPTED on Friday (#exoring modelling), and another student paper was submitted (from a Masters project) on monday (a possible #exoring system). The students who work with me are awesome :) 🔭🪐

(To be clear, they're generally awesome, not because they're working with me...)

Detecting and Characterizing Exomoons and Exorings (Handbook of... The circumplanetary environments in our Solar System host a stunning array of moon and ring systems. Study of these environs has yielded valuable insights into planetary system formation and...

An excellent review by @alexteachey on "Detecting and Characterizing Exomoons and Exorings" arxiv.org/abs/2401.13293 - this is required reading if you want to have an overview of these fields 🔭🪐 #exomoon #exoring #J1407b