Home▸Space & Astronomy▸Exoplanet Ring Detection 2D — Sky-Plane Transit Model

Exoplanet Ring Detection 2D — Sky-Plane Transit Model

Interactive 2D simulator: a ringed exoplanet's silhouette is projected straight onto the star's sky-plane disk and integrated with a polar quadrature light-curve model, showing exactly how ring tilt, position angle and optical depth turn a symmetric transit into the asymmetric ingress/egress signature astronomers use to detect exoplanetary ring systems.

Space & Astronomy2DAdvanced60 FPS📱 Mobile-adapted⇄ 3D version

A ring system around an exoplanet is far too small to resolve with any telescope, so astronomers infer it purely from how it distorts the transit light curve — a phenomenon that lives entirely in the two-dimensional sky plane. This simulator renders that sky-plane view directly: the star's limb-darkened disk, the planet's silhouette and the ring's projected ellipse, all drawn in true 2D geometry, with a light curve computed underneath by an independent polar-quadrature integration over the stellar disk. Adjust the ring's outer radius, tilt, position angle and optical depth and watch the transit deepen, stretch, and — for a ring whose position angle is neither aligned with nor perpendicular to the orbit — become measurably asymmetric between ingress and egress, exactly the deviation-from-symmetry astronomers use to flag a ringed-planet candidate.

⚙ Under the hood

A ringed exoplanet's silhouette is projected directly onto the star's sky-plane disk and integrated with an independent polar-quadrature light-curve model, showing exactly how ring tilt, position angle and optical depth turn a symmetric transit into the asymmetric ingress/egress signature astronomers use to flag ringed-exoplanet candidates.

exoplanetstransit-photometryplanetary-ringslight-curveastrophysics2d

2D · HTML5 Canvas 2D · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install