Predicting Photometric and Spectroscopic Signatures of Rings around Transiting Extrasolar Planets

We present theoretical predictions for photometric and spectroscopic signatures of rings around transiting extrasolar planets. On the basis of a general formulation for the transiting signature in the stellar light curve and the velocity anomaly due to the Rossiter effect, we compute the expected signals analytically for a face-on ring system, and numerically for more general configuration. In particular we consider the detectability of planetary rings around HD209458b and Saturn, and find that they are indeed marginally detectable even with the current observational accuracy as long as sufficiently sampled data points are available. Definitely the detection of rings around extrasolar transiting planets should be one of the major scientific goals of the up-coming space missions