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Scientists Discover Ring Around Dwarf Planet Haumea Beyond Neptune

Posted by BeauHD on from the ring-around-the-rosie dept.

A ring has been discovered around one of the dwarf planets that orbits the outer reaches of the solar system. Until now, ring-like structures had only been found around the four outer planets -- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The Guardian reports: "In 2014 we discovered that a very small body in the Centaurs region [an area of small celestial bodies between the asteroid belt and Neptune] had a ring and at that time it seemed to be a very weird thing," explained Dr Jose Ortiz, whose group at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia in Granada made the discovery described in the journal Nature. "We didn't expect to find a ring around Haumea, but we were not too surprised either." Haumea was recognized by the International Astronomical Union in 2008 and is one of five dwarf planets, alongside Pluto, Ceres, Eris and Makemake. They are located beyond Neptune -- 50 times farther away from the sun than Earth. Haumea, named after the Hawaiian goddess of childbirth, is unusual because of its elongated shape, comparable to a rugby ball, and its rapid rotation, spinning around once every 3.9 hours. Its diameter is approximately a third of the size of Earth's moon.

25 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. Nasty impact I would say by MichaelSmith · · Score: 1

    Its pretty clearly collided with something fairly large, splashing debris all over the place, leaving it with an uneven shape, and a lot of material in orbit.

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    1. Re:Nasty impact I would say by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Racists make poor trekkies. You just don't get it do you.

    2. Re:Nasty impact I would say by Hal_Porter · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Oh I dunno.

      You can make a case for Trek being very racist. All Vulcans are logical and inscrutable and a bit uptight. All Klingons are aggressive and warlike.

      Ferengi look and act like a Nazi caricature of Jews.

      I.e. in each case races have a well defined trait and all examples of that race seem to share. So I could see why someone who thinks that racial traits dominate over individual ones would like Trek even if Roddenberry would have been appalled by this.

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    3. Re:Nasty impact I would say by ChrisMaple · · Score: 1

      Creatures so different that they aren't in the same family, genus, or species cannot reasonably be classified by race.

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    4. Re:Nasty impact I would say by Nchantim · · Score: 1

      Oh I dunno.

      You can make a case for Trek being very racist. All Vulcans are logical and inscrutable and a bit uptight. All Klingons are aggressive and warlike.

      Ferengi look and act like a Nazi caricature of Jews.

      I.e. in each case races have a well defined trait and all examples of that race seem to share. So I could see why someone who thinks that racial traits dominate over individual ones would like Trek even if Roddenberry would have been appalled by this.

      You're confusing races with species.
      Do people think I'm racist if I start saying "all gorillas are herbivores?"
      And before anyone shouts "what about Miral Paris?", I redirect you to Beefalo.

    5. Re:Nasty impact I would say by Hal_Porter · · Score: 1

      "Alien race" is a pretty common expression, even if it makes taxonomists twitch.

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    6. Re:Nasty impact I would say by Hal_Porter · · Score: 1

      Right, and that's another way that Trek and similar series are a bit lacking in imagination.

      Of course you can handwave it a bit on the ground that special effects are expensive and an actor with some shit glued to their forehead is cheap.

      I'm actually more bothered by the fact that aliens act too human in Trek than look to human. It's a strange, Californian view of multiculturalism where everyone at least in the main cast is the same under the forehead bumps and ignoring their dietary preferences.

      Of course outside California that's not true at all - human cultures are really different from each other and it's just not true that someone who grew up in Africa is the same as someone who grew up in Syria is the same as someone who grew up in Germany.

      For example Germans didn't even have a word for 'taharrush gamea' until Merkel let in those migrants.

      In Star Trek series it's like, at least for the main cast, everyone is present day middle class American but they've got parents from the old country with some odd ideas. Meanwhile outside the main cast all aliens behave in the way stereotypical of their species.

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    7. Re:Nasty impact I would say by Mal-2 · · Score: 1

      As I understand it, the Ferengi are a piss-take of Jewish stereotypes, developed by Jewish writers which were at the time about half the team. Failure to grasp satire is not the same as actual racism.

      As for other races, I think the stereotyping exists because they just don't want to make the viewers work too hard. You may like grit and shadow and depth like DS9 (I do), but a whole lot of people just don't want to work that hard, or have moral quandaries put in front of them that can't be resolved in 43 minutes. Stereotyping whole races is similar to consolidating characters when books are turned into films. It's non-optimal, but it's also unavoidable.

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  2. Fashion trend by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    It is peer pressure.

    The little planets look at the big planets and see rings as status symbols.

    Soon there will be little moons and asteroids with fucking rings.

    Then the big planets will think rings are lame -- and do something new like giant blotchy red spots or maybe giant hexagons at the poles.

    1. Re:Fashion trend by Opportunist · · Score: 1

      And of course Uranus had to have large gas clouds. But you have to hand it to him, he's a really good sport and doesn't even take the jokes about his name with good humor, no, he goes out of his way to make them possible!

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    2. Re:Fashion trend by ChrisMaple · · Score: 1

      Danica is a car racer.

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    3. Re:Fashion trend by Opportunist · · Score: 1

      I cannot really tell whether this is informative, insightful, a rather ingenious attempt at trolling or you forgot to take your pills...

      Well done. *golfclap*

      It's been a while since I've read anything remotely that wacky at /.

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    4. Re:Fashion trend by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      "It's been a while since I've read anything remotely that wacky at /."

      Well, thank you... I think.
      In the old USENET days, we often strung each other along in these trains of thought, very early in our mornings.
      We were the Owl Shift. We weren't supposed to use UUCP, we were just supposed to do Sys stuff, and backups, but we did UUCP anyway.
      Pretty much the very best USENET string was, of course, based on a Monty Python bit: Crunchy Frog.
      How a tasty morsel called "Crunchy Frog" ended up being a "Spring Loaded Death Vagina" escapes me. You see, I was relatively normal. No Psychoses, no Pills; just sleep-deprived, and doing backups to tape, in almost awake.

      In Moldova, at Old Orhei, on top of a hill one would find a Celtic Cross, facing ESE. It is a very old Cross; in fact it is Varangian. The Varangians were the Vikings who went East, into what we now call Russia, and then South down the Dniester to the Black Sea. Those that stayed behind, and didn't go East, settled as the "Norsemen", the Normans.
      Those that went East were called the "Rus"; thus Russia. The Varangians took the Celtic Cross along with them; it might prove useful.
      In the center of that Cross at Old Orhei is a very old symbol, that predates Christianity. In fact, if you look for it, this symbol is all over the Balkans, on Crosses, and old Christian Tombstones, and even on the Tombstones of the vanished Jews, above their Cross of David. A Danica.
      Danicas are irreligious. They are in fact... Clocks. The Sun rises and sets every day, and the Moon does its thing every 28 days or so. The Seasons change, and each rough year advances into the next rough year. But there is only one thing that keeps long time on a regular basis; every 243 days. To the East at Morning, or to the West at Evening, Danica repeats herself, endlessly, and reliably, in the Skies.

      Now imagine to my surprise, that a Russian Photographer grokked this, and put out a sequence of Danica Sets. It covered 243 days, a week at a time. This Photographer is the very finest of this young Century in Portraiture, in my opinion. And this has nothing to do with any Metaphysical or Astrological nonsense. She understands Astronomy and Spectroscopy. A Girl after my own heart.

      A decade ago, if we had met, I would have pitched Woo. Do you know what Woo is? Neither do I, but I would have pitched it nonetheless.

      Too late now.
      Danica still rises reliably in the Morning, and every 243 days she traces her Clockwork progress through our uncomprehending Skies.

      Time for Sleep.

      Captcha: executor

  3. So Many by Big+Hairy+Ian · · Score: 1

    Didn't realize there were so many dwarf planets out therehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_planet

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  4. First line of TFS and Guardian article are wrong by hackertourist · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ring systems had already been found around asteroid Chariklo and Chiron. So Haumea is the 7th object in the solar system known to have rings.

  5. Re:First line of TFS and Guardian article are wron by MangoCats · · Score: 1

    There's rings, and then there's RINGS. Jupiter has rings, too.

    Topic switch: seems like the hundreds of dwarf planets in the far reaches of the solar system would be an interesting setting for a future fiction universe - one without FTL travel, transporters, etc. All you would need out there is a fusion power source to replace the sun, and I'm guessing that there's plenty of water hanging around in pockets out there.

  6. So? by ZeRu · · Score: 1

    Presence of the ring should not be unexpected. The particles were probably launched into space from the surface because of planetoid's low gravity and fast rotation. Of course I'm assuming that the ring is perpendicular to the rotation axis.

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    1. Re:So? by Baron_Yam · · Score: 1

      I would go so far as to say ANY object probably has rings if there isn't anything to disrupt them (where anything can include 'sufficiently long periods of time').

      If you think about it, stars are like galactic rings, the Kuiper belt and asteroid belt are rings around the Sun... it's no surprise to me that something that forms from particle collisions has some leftovers spinning around it.

    2. Re:So? by habig · · Score: 1

      Presence of the ring should not be unexpected. The particles were probably launched into space from the surface because of planetoid's low gravity and fast rotation. Of course I'm assuming that the ring is perpendicular to the rotation axis.

      TFA says there are two small moons, one of which is in the ring plane. For the Jovian planets, the rings seem to be fed by debris from impacts on their small moons near the ring planes: so this same story seems plausible here, too.

    3. Re:So? by almitydave · · Score: 1

      The ring is above the equator. I was surprised to read the rotation period is 3.9 hours for something that large. Then I started wondering, "that's gotta create some significant (relative to gravity) centripetal force. How much would gravity be reduced if you were standing on the equator on the long axis?" Calculemus!

      Haumea (according to Wikipedia):
      Size along longest axis: 2322 km
      Mass: 4e21 kg

      Based on this we can calculate centripetal acceleration using a = v^2/r:
      v = angular velocity = 2.322e6 m * pi / 14040 s = 519.571 m/s
      r = 1.161e6 m
      a = 0.2325186 m/s^2

      The acceleration due to gravity at that point on the equator is g = G*M/r^2:
      G = 6.674e-11 m^3/kg/s^2
      M = 4e21 kg
      r = 1.161e6 m
      g = 0.19805315 m/s^2

      Which (if my calculations are correct) means that centripetal force at that point is actually 17% HIGHER than gravity. You'd have to hang on (it wouldn't be hard: if you weighted 200lbs (91kg) on Earth, you'd only need 11.25oz (320g) of force). Maybe that's where the ring comes from? Material just rolls off the planet?

      Note: This assumes lots of stuff that may be incorrect.

      Note 2: This would mean that an object attached to the surface at that point, if released, would immediately enter into an elliptical orbit with a period GREATER than the rotational period of the planet. You could very easily launch and capture orbiting vehicles with tethers extending some distance up from the surface, assuming the surface was solid enough to anchor them. Alternatively, you could build a hangar structure, and orbiting vehicles, facing retrograde, would land on the ceiling.

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  7. Dwarf planet location correct, Ceres by JeffSh · · Score: 2

    article has fact errors about location of dwarf planets.

    Article states that all dwarf planets are beyond neptune but that's not true. Ceres is in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. the rest of the dwarf planets are indeed in the kuiper belt beyond neptune.

  8. Re:First line of TFS and Guardian article are wron by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

    Didn't wotsisface do it - the space tyrant series?

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  9. All the Single Planets by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 1

    Someone must like Haumea.

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  10. Uranus by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

    Make your own joke.

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  11. Re:"Rugby ball" by Tablizer · · Score: 1

    Yep, that's rugby, "the sport played in heaven".

    Don't you mean "sends you to heaven"?

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