(ORDO NEWS) — An international team of planetary scientists has discovered that the dwarf planet Quarar, located on the outskirts of the solar system, has a system of one or more gas and dust rings located at a distance of 4.1 thousand km from its surface.
“The discovery of a previously unknown ring system in the solar system was a big surprise for us, and in particular we did not expect to find it at such a large distance from Quarar.
This casts doubt on our ideas about how gas and dust rings can arise in the vicinity of planets,” – said Professor of the University of Sheffield (Great Britain) Vic Dillon, whose words are quoted by the press service of the university.
In addition to the eight recognized planets and Pluto, there are a huge number of dwarf planets in the solar system with a diameter of several hundred kilometers, most of which are located beyond the orbits of Neptune and Uranus.
One of them is the trans-Neptunian object Quarar, discovered by the famous American astronomer Michael Brown back in 2002.
According to current estimates by astronomers, this dwarf planet has a diameter of 1.12 thousand km, which makes it one of the largest small celestial bodies in the far reaches of the solar system.
Around Quarar revolves the 170-kilometer moon Weyvot, which was discovered by Brown and his colleagues five years after the discovery of this dwarf planet.
Due to the large distance to the Sun, the year on Kvarar lasts almost 289 years.
Dwarf planet rings
Professor Dillon and his colleagues discovered that Quarar has another moon besides Veyvot.
Its role is played by one or more densely located gas and dust rings, approximately 4.1 thousand km away from the surface of the dwarf planet.
In addition to Saturn and other giant planets, similar rings have been found only in two other dwarf planets – Chariklo and Haumea.
Scientists made this discovery in the course of episodic observations of how Quarar covers the light of a star far from us.
Such events, occultations – in the language of astronomers, allow scientists to look for traces of the existence of the atmosphere on distant planets, study its composition, and also determine the exact dimensions of small celestial bodies and their other properties.
In the course of such observations, which Professor Dillon and his colleagues carried out using the 10-meter GTC telescope installed in the Canary Islands, scientists unexpectedly found evidence that one or more dense gas and dust rings rotate around Quarar.
Their system was removed from the dwarf planet at an unexpectedly large distance, at which these structures of dust and gas, presumably, cannot be stable.
Despite scientists’ doubts, the existence of the Quarar ring system was confirmed in two follow-up observations of occultations.
The same observations indicated that these rings are similar in structure to Saturn’s F ring, containing many planetoids and dense accumulations of dust.
As astronomers suggest, this potentially indicates a similar mechanism for their formation, which makes the Quarar rings especially interesting for further study.
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