There’s a Ring Around This Dwarf Planet. It Shouldn’t Be There

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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/science/quaoar-rings-roche-limit.html

By Kenneth Chang, The New York Times. 

Excerpt: Quaoar, which orbits the sun in the distant Kuiper belt, is the latest small object shown to have a ring like the ones around Saturn. ...Quaoar (pronounced KWA-wahr ...is a little less than half the diameter of Pluto and about a third of the diameter of Earth’s moon. It is likely to be big enough to qualify as a dwarf planet, pulled by its gravity into a round shape. ...The ring is not visible in telescope images. Rather, astronomers found it indirectly, when distant stars happened to pass behind Quaoar, blocking the starlight. From 2018 through 2021, Quaoar passed in front of four stars, and astronomers on Earth were able to observe the shadow of the eclipses, also known as stellar occultations. However, they also observed some dimming of the starlight before and after the star blinked out. That pointed to a ring obscuring part of the light, an international team of astronomers concluded in Wednesday’s Nature paper....

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