A team of astronomers from the La Silla Observatory of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has discovered that a remote asteroid located on the periphery of the Solar System called Chariklo , is surrounded by two dense and narrow rings, which make it the smallest object ever found. so far owning this ring system .
“We weren’t looking for a ring and we didn’t think small bodies like Chariklo had them , so the discovery – and the impressive amount of detail we saw in the system – was quite a surprise!” states Felipe Braga-Ribas (National Observatory / MCTI, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) lead author of the new article and responsible for planning the observation campaign.
This finding makes the asteroid Chariklo (known as the centaur) the fifth object orbiting the Sun in the Solar System that has this peculiar characteristic and also the smallest object to possess it. The others are the well-known planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. At the moment the origin of this particular ring system is unknown but astronomers believe it could be due to a collision that later created a debris disk.
The discovery, published in the journal Nature , has been confirmed with seven telescopes , including the Danish 1.54-meter telescope and the TRAPPIST telescope, both at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile and thanks to the comparison of data obtained from the different locations, the team of researchers has been able to reconstruct the shape, width, orientation and other properties of the new rings discovered on the asteroid. Thus, the ring system is made up of two very thin rings, only three and seven kilometers wide, separated by a clear space of nine kilometers, around a 250 kilometer diameter centaur that orbits beyond Saturn.
Astronomers believe it is very likely that this asteroid has at least one moon , a phenomenon that could explain the birth of our own Moon in the early Solar System, as well as the origin of many other satellites around both planets and asteroids.
