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."

Comments

Rings Around It

[Anonymous Coward]

It's one thing to have rings around Uranus. It's another thing to have rings around your whole asteroid.

Re:Rings Around It

[Guppy06]

Kidding aside, as I recall Uranus' ring system itself was discovered through an occultation like this.

Well... I figured gravity was a given.

[Payden K. Pringle]

>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.

Re:Well... I figured gravity was a given.

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Anything with significant gravity can have a ring system under the right conditions.

And up until now, we didn't know if those right conditions ever occurred for asteroids. Now we do. That certainly counts as a discovery.

Re:Well... I figured gravity was a given.

[DerekLyons]

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.

True. But the smaller and weaker the gravitational field is, or the more perturbed it is, the lower the chance for a ring system to form let alone remain stable. Not to mention, there's a huge difference between something being theoretically (if extraordinarily remotely) possible and actually observing said thing in the wild.

Re:Well... I figured gravity was a given.

[Irate Engineer]

But it IS sensational science - it is a reported observation, fine.

Mind that the sciences do often need to think about PR for funding.

Of all the crap that gets posted on /., for this I say "Pretty cool, let them be sensational".

Beautiful looking asteroid!

[NotFamous]

Best to put a ring on it.

Re:The universe is fractal

[Xtifr]

Dig deeper, and you soon hit the Planck length, so, no. Really small things don't resemble larger things at all. That's why QM is so counter-intuitive. 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.

For that matter, go the other way, and you hit the light-speed barrier, which has a huge effect on the way really big things work. The very large and the very small are both immensely different from each other and from things on what we consider a normal, human scale. Your notion is poetic, but contradicts most of the physics discovered since the early 20th c.

Actually electrons DON'T orbit.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.