Cosmic collision created ringed planet

A comet-like planet surrounded by two fine rings of ice and pebbles has been found between Saturn and Uranus; astronomers believe it may have formed during a cosmic collision. The presence of the planet – named Chariklo – has actually been known for years, but a new camera on the Danish telescope at the La Silla Observatory allowed researchers to visualise the rings. “The camera was specially developed at the Niels Bohr Institute and has a stunningly high resolution, which we especially exploit to look for exoplanets,” said Uffe Gråe Jørgensen, an astronomer in Astrophysics and Planetary Science. “We weren’t looking for a ring and didn’t think small bodies like Chariklo had them at all, so the discovery – and the amazing amount of details we saw in the system – came as a complete surprise,” said Felipe Braga-Ribas, lead author of the paper published in Nature. When an object passes in front of a star, there in a small dip in the star’s brightness, but researchers also saw a dip in the brightness just before and just after the main occultation, suggesting rings around Chariklo. “The entire passage only lasted five seconds, but we could even determine incredible details about the ring,” said Gråe Jørgensen. The rings are comprised of ice particles and pebbles, 3 and 7km wide and no more than a few hundred metres thick, the astronomers said. The rings have been measured at a distance of two billion kilometres with an accuracy of plus/minus a few hundred metres. The celestial body was located in the Kuiper belt, home to thousands of dwarf planets and comets, but was thrown out to its current location said researchers. How the rings formed is a mystery but researchers believe a collision – similar to that which created our Earth-Moon system - is responsible. The rings might be a phenomenon which one day leads to the formation of a small moon, they say. A ring system detected around the Centaur (10199) Chariklo