Ring system discovered around dwarf planet Quaoar leaves astronomers puzzled A ring system has been spotted around dwarf planet Quaoar at a distance astronomers didn't believe was possible, defying astronomical theories on how these structures form. Quaoar lies in the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune. The icy rock is 1,121 kilometers (697 miles) wide, about half the diameter of Pluto. Quaoar is a distant …
"As a result of our observations, the classical notion that dense rings survive only inside the Roche limit of a planetary body must be thoroughly revised," - Giovanni Bruno
This is a good illustration of the situation that when we see 'problems' then studying them hard can result in us getting a better view of events, not just astronomically but in virtually every situation. I have always found problems to be very helpful in educating me about things that I'd never thought about before.
Okay, Space is wierd and very, very large, but if it's already wierd that a 1,100 km-wide ball of stuff has a ring system, it is absolutely mind-boggling that it might have cryovolcanoes.
Jupiter's moon Io has volcanoes, but that's because Jupiter's gravitational field is literally mushing up that little pizza ball. Quaoar does not have such a luxury, and I very much doubt the Sun can be counted on for melting its surface enough at that distance to encourage icy volcanic activity.
So, if this stuff is confirmed - and it still has to be, apparently - then astrophysicists are going to have a hell of a time explaining how a dead ball of ice deep in the freezer of space can be active enough to spout frozen geysers that manage to create a ring in such conditions.
This is going to be a mind-bender of major proportions.
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No need to speculate, there is already an explanation in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05629-6
"Our local collisional simulations show that elastic collisions, based on laboratory experiments [8], can maintain a ring far away from the body. Moreover, Quaoar’s ring orbits close to the 1/3 spin–orbit resonance [9] with Quaoar, a property shared by Chariklo’s [2,10,11] and Haumea’s [3] rings, suggesting that this resonance plays a key role in ring confinement for small bodies."
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So, the Sun is an astronomical body with a large ring, known as the asteroid belt, beyond its Roche limit.
"Ah," you say, "but that's because Jupiter."
The obvious conclusion is that Quaoar has a relatively large moon doing the same thing to its ring, we just ain't spotted it yet on account of not looking at the right time and place for stellar occultations.
Or am I missing something?
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the only thing we can do is guess according to what the math tells us should be, it's not surprising that a lot of astronomical theories are going to be proven wrong. If we really want to figure this stuff out, we need to sideline the magnifying glasses and divert the money into developing FTL spacecraft. We'll learn a lot more by actually going to these places and looking than we will by looking for tiny little wobbles from lightyears away.
Don't get me wrong, I'm as fascinated by this stuff as the next geek, but what we're doing right now is trying to figure out someone's spaghetti recipe by watching their kitchen window from 20 miles away. It would be better if we were sitting on a stool in the kitchen.
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Well, let me be the first to admit that I did not believe that I would live to see the day that a ring of dust would be discovered around a piece of crap floating way out there. This discovery will undoubtedly alter the fabric our society profoundly. (Still trying to figure out why astrophysics is a career path and not a hobby). NASA declined to mention that they are investigating the rings for signs of intelligent life.
Anyway, there is one inner planet with its own ring system: Earth, surrounded by junk.
It can be proved that making observations outside of earth's atmosphere can alter the fabric of our society. Take, for example, the discovery of helium. I don't think this has been nobbled by AI-powered search engines... yet. However...
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4614-5363-5
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Spinoffs from space and astronomical research are varied and plentiful, take the JWST; in order to make the mirrors sufficiently accurate they needed to develop an incredibly accurate non-contact way to measure curved surfaces. That technology is now being used to make laser eye surgery safer and more precise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
As for astronomy and astrophysics, pushing back how far we can track the evolution of the universe improves our understanding of the origin of it all which has ramifications at the other end of the scale in the quantum world. On a species selfish perspective astronomy is vital if we don't want to go the way of the dinosaurs. On top of that there are some really pretty structures in space, nice to get the glorious images NASA get from JWST & HST.
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