  The discovery of rings around extrasolar planets ("exorings") is one of the
next breakthroughs in exoplanetary research. Previous studies have explored the
feasibility of detecting exorings with present and future photometric
sensitivities by seeking anomalous deviations in the residuals of a standard
transit light curve fit, at the level of ~100 ppm for Kronian rings. In this
work, we explore two much larger observational consequences of exorings: (1)
the significant increase in transit depth that may lead to the
misclassification of ringed planetary candidates as false-positives and/or the
underestimation of planetary density; and (2) the so-called "photo-ring"
effect, a new asterodensity profiling effect, revealed by a comparison of the
light curve derived stellar density to that measured with independent methods
(e.g., asteroseismology). While these methods do not provide an unambiguous
detection of exorings, we show that the large amplitude of these effects
combined with their relatively simple analytic description, makes them highly
suited to large-scale surveys to identify candidate ringed planets worthy of
more detailed investigation. Moreover, these methods lend themselves to
ensemble analyses seeking to uncover evidence of a population of ringed
planets. We describe the method in detail, develop the basic underlying
formalism and test it in the parameter space of rings and transit config-
uration. We discuss the prospects of using this method for the first systematic
search of exoplanetary rings in the Kepler database and provide a basic
computational code for implementing it.
