BOSTON, March 18 (UPI) — Astronomers at MIT say they’ve detected a unique feature surrounding the centaur, or minor planet, called Chiron that splits the orbits of Saturn and Uranus. The unique feature may be a ring system, or it could just be a thin film of dust surrounding the orb.
Centaurs are a relatively new class of cosmic objects, rocky spheres that possess characteristics of both asteroids and comets. Five have been identified, so far, all orbiting in between the solar system’s asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt.
If Chiron (full name, 2060 Chiron) is confirmed to have rings, it would be the second ringed centaur discovered in a short period of time. Last year, a group of researchers discovered another centaur, Charliko, in possession of two dense, narrow rings.
Rings are streams of gas, dust and debris that emanate from an object’s interior and form a distinct orbital path.
“It’s interesting, because Chiron is a centaur — part of that middle section of the solar system, between Jupiter and Pluto, where we originally weren’t thinking things would be active, but it’s turning out things are quite active,” Amanda Bosh, a lecturer in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, explained in a press release.
Astronomers gleaned the possible presence of rings using two large telescopes in Hawaii, NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility and the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network. Researchers timed their observations to catch Chiron as it passed directly in front of a bright star, in order to capture its shadow, or stellar occultation.
Their timing worked. But when they analyzed the data they noticed something strange — a symmetrical anomaly at the beginning and end of the occultation, a blurring that suggested a small amount of debris might be blocking the light of the distant star. Looking closer, the astronomers located the same feature twice, both extending 186 miles from Chiron’s center — one four miles wide, and the other roughly 2 miles wide.
The rings don’t necessarily mean Chiron’s active, producing its own jets of gas and dust. It could have captured the debris from another object, or the material could simply be leftover from Chiron’s original formation.
In any case, the discovery is intriguing. But as usual, it leaves more work to be done.
“If we want to make a strong case for rings around Chiron, we’ll need observations by multiple observers, distributed over a few hundred kilometers, so that we can map the ring geometry,” MIT researcher Jessica Ruprecht said. “But that alone doesn’t tell us if the rings are a temporary feature of Chiron, or a more permanent one. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done.”
The discovery is detailed in a forthcoming issue of the scientific journal Icarus.
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