A careful analysis of hundreds of photographic plates of the star J1407 between 1890 and 2007 did not show its eclipses. Robin Mentel, a graduate student at Leiden University, was unable to detect dips in the luminosity of J1407 because of the planet J1407b, which hypothetically has giant rings. However, the eclipse could have been missed, since the observations of the star were not continuous.

Robin Mentel studied the young sun-like star J1407 (her age is 16 million years), located at a distance of about 460 light years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Centaurus. In 2007, the star showed a strange series of star eclipses. In 2015, a group of researchers came up with an explanation of these dips in brightness: the exoplanet J1407b rotates around a star with a huge ring system hundreds of times larger than Saturn’s ring system. In 2016, astronomers estimate that the ring system can be stable only if the rings rotate against the motion of the planet around the star. But now, in 2018, scientists have announced that they have not yet been able to find evidence of eclipses between 1890 and 2007.

Two years ago, Robin Mentel in Germany studied 490 photographic records of the star J1407. The oldest entries in the Digital Access to the Century of Sky Observations at Harvard are dated 1890. Materials from the collections of the Bamberg and Sonneberg observatories were also studied. Mentel compared the brightness of the star J1407 with two equally bright stars located next to it. If the star J1407 had been obscured at some point, it would have looked weaker in the photograph than two neighboring stars. As a result, the scientist found no eclipses on photographic plates.

Thanks to these results, researchers have placed limits on the potential duration of the period between two eclipses. They believe that another failure in the brightness of J1407 expects them in 2021 or 2024, and therefore they will have to wait for confirmation for several more years.

Star eclipses that led to a possability of planet with rings that are hundreds of times wider than Saturn's
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