Astronomers have discovered one of the most extraordinary exoplanets yet orbiting around a star very similar in terms of size and mass to our own Sun and located some 420 light years away in the constellation of Centaurus. The star, known as J1407, is much younger than our Sun at only 16 million years of age (the Sun is around 4.5 billion years old) and it’s bizarre planet (or possibly a “failed star” known as a “brown dwarf”) J1407b was detected by observing how this alien world blocked some of the star’s light as it passed in front of its parent sun back in 2007. J1407b is much larger than either Jupiter or Saturn and has a ring system that is estimated to be 200 times as large as Saturn’s The image shown is what it might look like in our own sky if you were to substitute our own ring world for this new one.
