Video Illustration Credit: Lucie Maquet, Observatoire de Paris, LESIA
Explanation: Asteroids can have rings. In a surprising discovery announced two weeks
ago, the distant asteroid 10199
Chariklo was found to have at least two orbiting rings. Chariklo's diameter
of about 250 kilometers makes it the largest of the measured centaur asteroids,
but now the smallest known object to have rings. The centaur-class minor planet orbits the Sun
between Saturn and Uranus. The above
video gives an artist's illustration of how the rings were discovered.
As Chariklo
passed in 2013 in front of a faint star, unexpected but symmetric dips in the
brightness of the star revealed the rings. Planetary
astronomers are now running computer simulations
designed to investigate how Chariklo's unexpected ring
system might have formed, how it survives, and given the asteroid's low mass
and close passes of other small asteroids and the planet
Uranus, how long it may last.
