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First Asteroid Discovered Sporting a Ring System
astroengine (1577233) writes "When you think of a celestial ring system, the beautiful ringed planet Saturn will likely jump to mind. But for the first time astronomers have discovered that ring systems aren't exclusive to planetary bodies — asteroids can have them too. Announced on Wednesday, astronomers using several observatories in South America, including the ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile, have discovered that distant asteroid Chariklo possesses two distinct rings. Chariklo, which is approximately 250 kilometers (155 miles) wide, is the largest space rock in a class of asteroids known as Centaurs that orbit between Saturn and Uranus in the outer solar system. '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!' said lead researcher Felipe Braga-Ribas, of the Observatório Nacional and MCTI, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil."
I think you misspelled "planet".
Never forget Pluto!
Bah, it's just following the dictate to have haircuts like Kim Jong Un.
And, yes, that's evidently a real requirement in North Korea now.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It circles around Uranus !
It's one thing to have rings around Uranus. It's another thing to have rings around your whole asteroid.
>But for the first time astronomers have discovered that ring systems aren't exclusive to planetary bodies — asteroids can have them too.
I get the word "discovered" here, but... I wouldn't think that gravity is exclusive to planetary bodies. Anything with significant gravity can have a ring system under the right conditions.
Sensationalist article is sensationalist. But hey, it's slashdot.
Best to put a ring on it.
Some settling may occur during posting.
Tut-tut. Grammar counts!
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
So, Pluto became a "dwarf planet" due to several factors including size, not clearing its orbit, etc. Maybe we now need another category - "giant asteroid" or "ringed asteroid" or some such to denote these "almost a dwarf planet but with rings like a damn giant planet" guys?
No tide?
What's to say it's a natural phenomenon. Perhaps it's an alien asteroid mining system. Especially considering they are "so sharply confined". Their explanation for that is "shepherd moons". Aliens.
It pretty much seems to be an observable fact from trees to planetary bodies to particle physics. Dig deeper and the parts resemble the whole.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
Does a ring system tell us that this asteroid has volatile compounds on it? Developers may not have to go to the Oort Cloud for water after all.
Sucks that there's no pictures except some stupid artist's depictions.
But I guess it's still kind of cool so maybe I'll drink a La Trappe Dubbel in honor of TRAPPIST and, uh, eat a Danish pastry in honor of Danish.
Actually I'm just hungry.
So you can not put a bird on it.
ring systems aren't exclusive to planetary bodies — asteroids can have them too
Since the dividing line between "planet" and "asteroid" was drawn more-or-less arbitrarily by us humans, I wasn't expecting rings to be exclusive to planets in the first place.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Heck, you don't even have to dig that deep to realize that an atom does not resemble the solar system, even though both have small things orbiting a large central mass.
Actually electrons DON'T orbit nuclei. What they do is more akin to being standing waves surrounding them. With the opposite charges on the electrons and the nuclei, if they orbited in the classical mechanics sense they'd continuously emit electromagnetic radiation and the orbit would quickly decay. This is part of what put physicists onto the track of quantum mechanics.
It's one of the big differences between the nanoscopic world where quantum mechanical effects become obviously far larger than the classical mechanics approximations they approach at large scales in incoherent bulk material.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
They had to announce this for their own safety. If they hadn't, nobody else would have looked at it and they'd be dead in a week.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
via google translate: Le Monde