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A planetary ring in a surprising place

An object in the distant Solar System has been shown to have a ring that is unusually far from its host — prompting speculation about how the ring material has avoided clumping together to form moons.
  1. Matthew M. Hedman

    1. Matthew M. Hedman is in the Department of Physics, University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho 83844, USA.

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Planetary rings are disks containing many small chunks of ice and other materials that are in orbit around a larger object1. Most rings are found within a critical distance of their host, known as the Roche limit, where the gravitational pull of the host prevents this material from accreting into objects. But in a paper in Nature, Morgado et al.2 report the discovery of a ring that doesn’t follow this rule: it lies far outside the Roche limit of its host and is thus at odds with our current understanding of how such rings are maintained.

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Nature 614, 232-233 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00270-3

References

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  9. Pater, I., Renner, S., Showalter, M. & Sicardy, B. in Planetary Ring Systems (eds Tiscareno, M. S. & Murray, C. D.) Ch. 5, 112–124 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2018).

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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