More than 30 years ago this week, a discovery was made which all of six people in the world will celebrate - the discoverers and their moms. But it was a fascinating revelation, and in our attempt here to honor the disenfranchised niches of astronomy and to give you insight into the crazy, serendipitous things that happen in the land of science, today we will look at how the rings of Uranus were discovered.

When I was a kid, way back when, only Saturn had rings. The other big guys out there - Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune - were ringless balls of gas.

But then, on 10 March 1977, astronomers studying the atmosphere of distant Uranus were surprised to find blips in their data. Here’s what happened.

The big planets out there are so very far away it is difficult to get much detail about them from here. So astronomers have to think of ingenious ways to bleed them of useful data.

One way is to allow distant stars to help. How? When a planet passes in front of a star the star’s light is, obviously, hidden from us. But in those moments just before it disappears behind the planet, the starlight has to pass through the atmosphere of yon planet. The waves gets distorted and certain wavelengths get kidnapped altogether. Really smart people can read the light we get - or don’t get - from the star and deduce what was in the planet’s atmosphere that ran interference.

Well, this very scenario was about to play out for three astronomers, James L. Elliot, Edward Dunham, and Douglas Mink back in 1977 when they noticed something strange. Before the star even got near to Uranus’ atmosphere, the distant star’s light dimmed and brightened, five times in total, like it was blinking on and off. Then, after the star reappeared on the other side of the planet, it did the same thing!

The only possible explanation of successive blinkings, mirrored on both sides, was that Uranus must have a tiny ring system around it, composed of at least 5 thin rings.

In fact, it did! The spacecraft Voyager 2 imaged those rings in its 1986 fly-by. They were just several kilometers thick and made of darker material than Saturn’s famous system which are the reasons why they escaped detection for so long. There are now a total of 13 known rings around Uranus.

But it wouldn’t end with Uranus. In 1979, Jupiter’s almost invisible rings were discovered, and in 1989 distant Neptune was caught with some.

But how those were all discovered is a story for another day.

Until next time, clear skies!