The universe is full of surprises, but two discoveries in the outer solar system are dominating astronomy news this week. First, astronomers reported yesterday that they have found a distant, tiny world – a small, icy body that lives in the darkness far beyond the orbit of Neptune. Called 2012 VP113, the world’s existence challenges theories describing the infant solar system, and flames speculation that a large planet hides on the fringes of detection. 2012 VP113 and its sibling Sedna are now the two farthest-flung, roundish objects we’ve spied whose gravitational allegiance lies with the sun.
Next, we learned of an asteroid-like body with rings. Called Chariklo, the ringed world is a Centaur – an icy, rocky object that lives between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune. Chariklo is the first not-planet in the solar system known to have a ring system. And it isn’t just any old ring system – there are two bright, glimmering icy rings encircling the enigmatic, 248-kilometer-wide world. For decades, scientists had thought a small body’s gravity would be too weak to cling to rings like Saturn’s. “When it appeared, it was a complete surprise,” said Felipe Braga-Ribas, a planetary scientist at the National Observatory in Brazil, who discovered Chariklo’s rings hiding in a few seconds of observational data.
“We started trying to understand it.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-MumUHazhE