Exoplanet Ring Detection — Transit Light Curve Asymmetry

Rings around planets in our own solar system are common, so exoplanets should have them too — but a ring system is far too small to resolve with any telescope, so it has to be inferred from how it distorts the transit light curve. This simulator renders a tilted, semi-transparent ring orbiting a glowing star in real 3D, while a physically modelled light curve is computed underneath from limb-darkened stellar-disk sampling: 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.