Its got rings
Quite the announcement this morning. From the
European Southern Observatory:
First Ring System Around AsteroidObservations at many sites in South America, including ESO�s La Silla Observatory, have made the surprise discovery that the remote asteroid Chariklo is surrounded by two dense and narrow rings. This is the smallest object by far found to have rings and only the fifth body in the Solar System �- after the much larger planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune -� to have this feature. The origin of these rings remains a mystery, but they may be the result of a collision that created a disc of debris. The new results are published online in the journal Nature on 26 March 2014.
The rings of Saturn are one of the most spectacular sights in the sky, and less prominent rings have also been found around the other giant planets. Despite many careful searches, no rings had been found around smaller objects orbiting the Sun in the Solar System. Now observations of the distant minor planet (10199) Chariklo as it passed in front of a star have shown that this object too is surrounded by two fine rings.
"We weren�t looking for a ring and didn�t think small bodies like Chariklo had them at all, so the discovery � and the amazing amount of detail we saw in the system � came as a complete surprise!" says Felipe Braga-Ribas (Observat�rio Nacional/MCTI, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) who planned the observation campaign and is lead author on the new paper.
The telescopes used in the discovery are fairly modest -- the biggest is 1.54 meters aperture. It will be interesting to see what some of the big guns can see - the
W. M. Keck observatory on big island has two ten meter aperture scopes.
Very cool!
Posted by DaveH at March 26, 2014 1:32 PM