Rings of Chariklo
The discovery was made by a team of astronomers using ten telescopes at various locations in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay in South America during observation of a stellar occultation on 3 June 2013, and was announced on 26 March 2014.
Ring systems around minor bodies had not previously been discovered despite the search for them through direct imaging and stellar occultation techniques.
[4] Chariklo is the largest confirmed member of a class of small bodies known as centaurs, which orbit the Sun between Saturn and Uranus in the outer Solar System.
[6] With the aid of thirteen telescopes located in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay,[7] a team of astronomers led by Felipe Braga Ribas (cite), a post-doctoral astronomer of the National Observatory (ON), in Rio de Janeiro,[7] and 65 other researchers from 34 institutions in 12 countries,[2] was able to observe this occultation event, a phenomenon during which a star disappears behind its occulting body.
[9] The relatively consistent ring properties inferred from several secondary occultation observations discredit alternative explanations for these features, such as cometary-like outgassing.
[12] Also consistent with this edge-on orientation is that since 2008, the Chariklo system has increased in brightness by a factor of 1.5 again, and the infrared water-ice spectral features have reappeared.
Impact velocities in the outer Solar System are typically ≈ 1 km/s (compared with the escape velocity at the surface of Chariklo of ≈ 0.1 km/s), and were even lower before the Kuiper belt was dynamically excited, supporting the possibility that the rings formed in the Kuiper belt before Chariklo was transferred to its current orbit less than 10 Myr ago.
[2] Such moons would be very challenging to detect via direct imaging from Earth due to the small radial separation of the ring system and Chariklo.
The authors suggest three main explanations: They additionally noted that the effects of some of the assumptions, for instance complete absence of eccentricity of the rings, have not been evaluated.
