Chiron centaur may have rings around it: Scientists

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WASHINGTON: Our Solar System has an exclusive group of celestial bodies that are known to possess planetary ring systems. Saturn is most famous among all, but Uranus, Neptune and Jupiter also sport understated dusty rings.
Scientists have previously discovered a minor planet named Chariklo, surrounded by rings and recent findings have also shown that a second similar object also has the same features.
The objects belong to a class of minor planets known as centaurs that have qualities of both asteroids and comets. Earlier, researchers were used to believe that centaurs were dormant but the latest findings suggest otherwise.
Now, they have discovered that a second centaur called Chiron also has rings, indicating that far from being a frozen and inactive subclass of solar system bodies, centaurs are likely to be a lot livelier than thought.
Amanda Bosh, of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, said, “It’s interesting, because Chiron is a centaur – part of that middle section of the solar system, between Jupiter and Pluto, where we originally weren’t thinking things would be active, but it’s turning out things are quite active”.
It was long known that an object without surrounding material would exhibit a straightforward pattern, but the latest observations of Chiron has revealed symmetrical features, which has further suggested that gas or dust could be blocking some of the starlight.
According to the researchers, the formation of the rings had taken place after some other body started breaking up, and generated debris that were pulled into the centaur’s orbit. They also believed that the debris could have been the leftover from the creation of Chiron itself.
In 2011, Bosh’s team of researchers was able to precisely measure another occultation event and revealed a lot of details about Chiron and the space surrounding it. It was done with the help of two powerful telescopes in Hawaii, NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility on Mauna Kea and the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network at Haleakala.