Quaoar, a celestial body in the darkness outside of Neptune, has been found to have unusual rings that cannot be explained by current theories of ring formation.
According to the University of Sheffield in the UK and foreign media, an international research team led by Professor Bruno Morgado from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil published the results of observations of rings in Quaoa in the scientific journal Nature.
Quaoah, whose existence was first confirmed in 2002, has been observed as a celestial body with a diameter of about 1,280 km, orbiting the sun with a cycle of 288 years, in the outer edges, about 6.4 billion km away from the sun
▲ A ring formed outside the celestial body Quaoah and the ring boundary (blue circle) outside Neptune.
It has been suggested that such a small celestial body, only half of Pluto, which had the status of the ninth planet in the solar system and was demoted to a dwarf planet, has a ring of its own, and that doesn’t even fit the theory forming a circle.
The research team found the rings at Quaoa using the highly sensitive high-speed camera ‘HiPERCAM’ mounted on the ‘Large Canary Telescope’ (LGT) with an aperture of 10.4 m, the world ’s largest optical telescope on the island of La Palma.
The rings are so small and faint that they do not appear in direct images of Quaoah.
Instead, when Quaoah passes in front of another star and passes in less than a minute in a “stellar eclipse” (star eclipse), he unexpectedly catches the starlight shrinking back and forth twice, confirming the existence circle around the celestial body.
In the solar system, rings exist on large planets such as Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune, and Uranus, and only two of the smaller celestial bodies, such as Chariklo and Haumea, have been discovered.
It has been suggested that each of these rings is close enough for the tidal force of celestial bodies to act, so that the materials that make up the rings do not combine into satellites (moon) and continue as rings.
It was within what is known as the ‘Roche limit’, the maximum distance a ring could exist.
However, the ring found in Quaoah was formed in a place seven times the radius of the celestial body, reaching twice the Roche limit.
Saturn’s central ring, the most prominent in the solar system, forms three times the radius of the planet.
“I did not expect to find a new ring in the solar system, and even more so I did not expect to find a ring formed so far away from a celestial body that would challenge ring theories present,” said the study’s co-author. Dr Vick Dillon, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Sheffield “Everyone learns about Saturn’s beautiful rings as a child, and we hope that this new discovery will provide a wider insight into the formation of rings.”
Quaoah is named after the Creator worshiped by the Tongba people, a native of southern California.
The satellite with a diameter of 74 km was also named ‘Weywot’ after Quaoa’s son.
In terms of Kuiper Belt celestial object status, Quaoah has enough qualifications to be classified as a dwarf planet with a spherical shape due to gravity, but it is only captured as a faint point even with the highest performance telescope, so no one can said to be a dwarf planet, the New York Times reported. .