Recent images from a telescope will reveal that a small planet still located in our solar system has a dense ring around it, and not a moon. Scientists are perplexed with the discovery and attempt to discover the reason for formation.
The planet Quaar is one of two about 3,000 small planets that orbit the sun besides Netune and, with a little more than 1,000 kilometers in length, is the seventh largest of them.
Quaar observations made between 2018 and 2021 will reveal that the planet possesses an anel more distant than scientists believe to be possible, according to a press release from the European Space Agency (ESA), which used terrestrial telescopes and a new space probe to collect the dice.
Based on conventional thinking, all the material that makes up the dense ring of Quaoar should have condensed and formed a small moon, but this does not happen.
“The first results suggest that the freezing temperatures in Quaoar may play a role in preventing the ice particles from sticking together, but further investigation is necessary,” according to the press release.
Before Quaoar’s new observations, scientists believed that it was impossible for the planets to form an anemia beyond a certain distance. This is a rule of thumb from celestial mechanics, that the material in orbit around a planet will form a spherical object – or a moon – if it is at a sufficiently distant distance from the planet.
No meanwhile, this lua will be torn apart if it approaches what is called the “Roche limit”, a point not which the forces of the planet would be stronger than the gravity that holds the lua together.
All circles around Saturn, for example, are within the Roche limit of the planet. Or that it is intriguing about Quaoar, not so much, that it is located well beyond the limit of Roche, in an area where the material should form a moon.
“As a result of our observations, the classical notion that dense aneis survive just within the Roche limit of a planetary body must be completely revised,” said Giovanni Bruno, of the INAF Astrophysical Observatory of Catania, in Italy, in a statement.
Collecting the dice that revealed the ring of Quaoar was in itself a reason for commemoration. Due to the planet’s small size and distance from Earth, researchers wanted to observe it using a “cloak” – a means of observing a planet while expecting it to be essentially illuminated by a star.
This can be an extremely difficult process, according to ESA, because either the telescope or the planet and the star must all be in perfect alignment. This observation was made possible by recent efforts by the space agency to provide a detailed map without star precedents.
The Cheops telescope was also used, which was launched in 2019. The Cheops normally studies exoplanets or bodies that are located outside of Earth’s solar system.
In this case, the device looked at something closer to Quaoar, which orbits the Sun still longer than Netune – about 44 times longer than the orbit of Earth.
“I was a little skeptical about the possibility of doing this with Cheops,” said Isabella Pagano, director of the Observatório Astrofísico de Catania, in a statement.
The observation worked, and Cheops marked the first of its kind – an occultation of two more distant planets of our solar system by a space telescope.
The researchers will then compare the data collected by Cheops with the observations of two terrestrial telescopes, raising their surprising revelation.
“When we put it all together, we saw dips in brightness that were not caused by Quaoar, but rather pointed to the presence of material in a circular orbit around us. The moment we saw this, we said: ‘Ok, we are selling an anel around Quaoar,’” said Bruno Morgado, professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, who led the analysis.
The theorists are now working to try to find out how Quaoar’s anel survived.
Source: CNN Espanol