Ring it up: Tiny planet sports a huge find
Distant Haumea joins Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune
As kids, we all knew Saturn was the one planet in our solar system with rings.
Then rings were discovered around Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune. And now a new study reports that a ring has been spotted around another object in our solar system: Haumea, a weird, eggshaped, distant dwarf planet beyond Neptune.
It’s the first time a ring has been discovered around such a distant body in the solar system, according to the study, which appeared in the peer-reviewed British journal Nature.
“In 2014 we discovered that a very small body in the Centaurs region (an area of small celestial bodies between the asteroid belt and Neptune) had a ring, and at that time it seemed to be a very weird thing,” study lead author José Ortiz told The Guardian. “We didn’t expect to find a ring around Haumea, but we were not too surprised either.”
Ortiz heads the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía in Spain, which made the discovery. The team spotted the rings by using 12 telescopes from 10 different laboratories on Jan. 21, 2017, as Haumea passed in front of a distant star, known as occultation.
His team said Haumea’s ring has a width of about 43 miles and a radius of roughly 1,400 miles.
“There are different possible explanations for the formation of the ring; it may have originated in a collision with another object, or in the dispersal of surface material due to the planet’s high rotational speed,” Ortiz said.
Haumea, which spins on its axis every four hours, is one of the fastest-rotating objects in the solar system.
Astronomers also recently spotted rings around the dwarf planets Chariklo and Chiron, which are located between Saturn and Uranus. Unlike ordinary planets, dwarf planets are defined as bodies that have not cleared other material out of their orbital paths, according to Nature.
The discovery shows rings could be much more common in our solar system as well as in other planetary systems, Ortiz said.
Haumea, which takes 284 years to orbit the sun, is named for the Hawaiian goddess of childbirth and fertility.