Astronomers have found an asteroid with its own rings. – Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman

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Astronomers have found an asteroid with its own rings.

March 26, 2014 10:07 pm Robert Zimmerman

Astronomers have found an asteroid with its own rings.

Chariklo is the largest member of a class known as the Centaurs and it orbits between Saturn and Uranus in the outer Solar System. Predictions had shown that it would pass in front of the star UCAC4 248-108672 on 3 June 2013, as seen from South America. Astronomers using telescopes at seven different locations, including the 1.54-metre Danish and TRAPPIST telescopes at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, were able to watch the star apparently vanish for a few seconds as its light was blocked by Chariklo — an occultation.

But they found much more than they were expecting. A few seconds before, and again a few seconds after the main occultation there were two further very short dips in the star’s apparent brightness. Something around Chariklo was blocking the light! By comparing what was seen from different sites the team could reconstruct not only the shape and size of the object itself but also the shape, width, orientation and other properties of the newly discovered rings.

The team found that the ring system consists of two sharply confined rings only seven and three kilometres wide, separated by a clear gap of nine kilometres — around a small 250-kilometre diameter object orbiting beyond Saturn.

One comment

Blair Ivey
March 27, 2014 at 9:25 pm
I noticed that the discovering astronomers have ‘informally’ named the rings, and that the IAU will assign ‘official’ names later. My thinking is that if you discover something, you have every right to name it. Scientists in the life sciences don’t leave the naming of new species to a governing body.

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