After all that excitement about black hole accretion disks being added in the dev thread, it's a happy coincidence that this neato bit of science just came to light:
Basically, it's a white dwarf star with Saturn-like rings. They're glowing with a red colour, but if I'm reading this right it's not due to the ring's frictional heat (like it is with an accretion disk). Rather, there's a small amount of gas in the ring being produced by inter-particle collisions, and that gas is fluorescing due to the ultraviolet light being emitted by the white dwarf. So it's like the ring system itself has an aurora. Neat!
Here's the artist's conception from the article, showing the white dwarf and its glowing red rings with Saturn and its ring system for scale:
There's also a spiral density wave in the ring, which is also pretty neat. The version of this image in the article is gigantic, might make a nice desktop wallpaper.
Ooh, spiffy! Have you shown Vlad? I didn't realize that glowing spiral-rippled rings could be done with the existing engine, I thought both of those features would be waiting on the accretion disk work before it could be implemented.
FaceDeer, I am not a magician, so I can tell my tricks.
The ring is not a ring, but a flattened Planet, with a 'Oblateness' of 0.999. The spiral is a cloud layer: The 'glow' is generated by the corresponding parameters (GlowMap GlowMode GlowColor GlowBright). The hole in the middle, I create with 'DiffMapAlpha "Transp"', a parameter which, as far as I know, is actually only intended for cloud layers, but also works with surface textures.