Giant rings encircle young exoplanet

Move over, Saturn. The rings around exoplanet J1407b have got you beat by a long shot. Thirty-seven rings extending 90 million kilometers from the planet — over half the distance from the Earth to the sun — encircle the world. These planetary rings are the first found outside the solar system.

The rings are probably shaped by moons forming around the young planet, which is 434 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus. One large gap in the rings is probably being cleared by a moon less than 80 percent the mass of Earth, astronomers report January 23 on arXiv.org..

Pebble teases new hardware and software

Pebble has been around the smartwatch game for a while now, and in 2014 we saw the company release the Pebble Steel, a more premium version of its original smartwatch. Now Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky has teased what his firm has planned for the new year.

Migicovsky has revealed in an interview with The Verge that Pebble has new products planned for 2015, including both hardware and software. The CEO wouldn’t drop many details, but he did tease that the new software will be rather different from Android Wear and the Apple Watch. “We’ve found a new framework to use as an interaction model on the watch. It doesn’t looks like what we have today, and it doesn’t look like what’s on your smartphone,” Migicovsky said.