Topic: new minor planet ( a Centaur) with rings found
mightymoe's photo
Thu 09/17/15 12:47 PM
It is about 250 kilometers in diameter, has two rings, one about seven and the other about three kilometers wide, separated by a gap of nine kilometers, at 396 and 405 kilometers from the minor planet.
It is the smallest known object to have rings and only the fifth body in the solar system—after the much larger Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune—to have this feature.

Chariklo, the largest known centaur object, orbiting in a region between Saturn and Uranus, is a very intriguing celestial body that surprised astronomers last year. This remote minor planet has unveiled the existence of its rings during a stellar occultation, when it passed in front of a star UCAC4 248-108672.

Astronomer José Luis Ortiz from the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Spain, who was a member of the team that made the discovery, assumes that the ring systems on other minor objects in the solar system could be more common than we think.
"There is the possibility that other centaurs and trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) might have rings," Ortiz told Phys.org.

PHYSORG
By Tomasz Nowakowski (report)
Read more here: http://phys.org/news/2015-09-lords-centaurs.html

First Ring System Around Asteroidhttp://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1410/

Centaurs are bodies in orbit believed to be from outside the solar system...

no photo
Thu 09/17/15 05:15 PM
Edited by SM8 on Thu 09/17/15 05:16 PM
My 12 year old and I watched a bit of this youtube video

First Ring System Around Asteroid


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X7PTBhGXi8