Something put a ring around a tiny world orbiting beyond Neptune. It shouldn't exist.
As University of Idaho physicist Matthew Hedman put it in, this places Quaoar’s ring system “at odds with our current understanding of how such rings are maintained.”Rings are made of chunks of dust, ice, and other materials, orbiting in a disk around a planetary body. For many years, the large, beautiful rings of Saturn, first observed and characterized in the 1600s, were the only ones known to astronomers.
But Quaoar’s Roche limit is about 1,100 miles from its center. The dense ring orbits at 2,500 miles from the dwarf planet’s center. “This means that the mutual gravitational attraction of chunks of water ice [in the ring] should easily overwhelm the variations in Quaoar’s gravitational pull,” Hedman writes. “We therefore need some other explanation for why this material hasn’t aggregated into a moon.
It’s also possible the ring material itself is bouncier than models predict. If so, each chunk would be more likely to bounce off another than to stick, even without the tug of Quaoar’s gravity to keep them apart.Another possibility is that the ring system is regularly perturbed by the gravity of some other object, such as Quaoar’s moon, Weywot, or another, yet-to-be-discovered moon. It is, after all, very difficult to study trans-Neptunian objects.
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