Astronomers Just Spotted an Asteroid With Two Rings

what does this mean?

This surprised a lot of astronomers and they are still scratching their heads.  Of course rings are associated with Saturn, Neptune and other planets.  Other planets meaning exoplanets that they have spotted in the last decade.  That is for another post however.  This latest find has absolutey baffled some space experts:

From ESO, observations made at telescopes in South America have made the surprise discovery that the remote asteroid Chariklo is surrounded by two dense and narrow rings. This is the smallest object to have rings and only the fifth body in the Solar System — after the much larger planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — to have this feature. The origin of these rings remains a mystery, but they may be the result of a collision that created a disc of debris.

Would you have ever thought something like this would be possible?

And what are your theories on how they got there?  Perhaps there are some gravitational forces that we do not understand?

Let’s check out a video of this double ringed asteroid on page 2

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One Comment;

  1. David Hua Ken Cheng said:

    An asteroid with rings – nothing unusual. This piece of rock (Chariklo) – classified under a class known as centaurs – Is too small to be a dwarf – too big to be a asteroid. May not have a magnetic core but perhaps just a piece of rock with magnetic properties and a electromagnetic field.

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