Quaoar’s ring, planet X and other mysteries to discover in our solar system

The history of science is littered with unexpected results: planets orbiting places where we thought they shouldn’t be able to form, gas and stars moving faster than the gravity of objects we see allows, or galaxies receding from us when we imagined them still. There is data that has given rise to new paradigms: the Universe is expanding, the planets are migrating and there is more mass than we see with light. And measures that have led us to the formulation of new theories that break with the status quo of our knowledge to date.

But science also gives us little surprises, little conceptual jewels that are impossible until they appear before our eyes for the first time. From time to time unique, peculiar objects are discovered, which may not alter the course of the history of science or the conception we have of the Universe, but which force us to think beyond what we thought possible up to that moment. These last ones, I have to confess, are the observations that we theorists like the most, those that show realities where they should not and that force us to question what we know, to rethink what we thought and to try to decipher what it is that we have not taken into account. account in the models. Among the latter is the discovery of the ring of Quaoar.

Quaoar is a minor body in the Solar System, that is, a body that orbits the Sun, but that is not a planet, nor a dwarf planet, nor a satellite. This means that it is part of the family that includes most of the asteroids, the objects that orbit beyond the orbit of Neptune in our Solar System, and also comets. It could be said that he is just anyone: with number 50,000 in the series, until 2002 we didn’t even know he existed. Now it has its own name, baptized in honor of the name given to the force of creation for the Tongva tribeancient settlers of the lowlands of the southern coast of California.

Quaoar is approximately the size of the Iberian Peninsula if we made it into a ball. It is slightly smaller, at 555 km in radius, than Earth’s newly discovered iron core. In addition, it has a moon called Weywot with a radius of just 80 km and orbiting Quaoar 13,320 km away. This is not much, serve as a reference that between Palencia and Sydney there is a distance of 17,000 km. And, as it is a smaller body, if this seems little to us, Quaoar also has a recently discovered planetary ring and this is interesting because it is not only the third example of a ring around a small body that has been found in the Solar System , the other two around Centaur Chariklo and of Haumeabut also because the ring is not where expected.

A planetary ring is a disk made up of tiny pieces of ice and other material that the larger object orbits. The most famous, the image that comes to mind is that of the precious rings that surround Saturn. But the four giant planets in our solar system – Saturn, Neptune, Uranus and Jupiter – have rings, the thing is that the rings of both Neptune and Jupiter are so faint that they are difficult to observe and we didn’t know that until we passed by the voyager.

The location of the rings is essential to understand them, all the rings found to date are within what we know as the Roche limit of their central bodies. This in the language of words, which is what we move with here in the newspaper articles, means that the material that forms the rings has to be close so that gravity with the central object continuously breaks the pieces of material, inhibiting the moon formation.

The Quauar ring is beyond that critical distance, specifically 4100 km. At that distance from the central object, the particles that make up the ring should collide with each other and stick together because the attraction between the pieces of ice is greater than the tidal forces. The ring is dense and narrow which means there are enough collisions and from what we know, let’s say rather, we knew, they should form moons in just a couple of decades (yes, a moon can form that fast!).

Planetary rings are history and also something more mundane: colliding ice perhaps stirred up by the existence of a moon. Pure disk-shaped beauty. Seeing the ring at that distance from Quaoar means that there are other processes that we have not taken into account and that are causing the material not to accumulate to form moons. Quaoar’s planetary ring is too narrow and small to be detected directly. To see it, the occultation technique has been used with multiple telescopes that measure how Quaoar’s light attenuates the light of the stars as it passes in front of it. In this detection the telescope GRANTECAN and its HiPERCAM high-speed camera have played a starring role as the duration of the cloak lasts less than a minute.

The proposed solution to explain the existence of the ring in this case involves assuming that the particles may be experiencing external gravitational thrusts that cause them to collide at high speed and therefore do not coagulate and grow. These types of disturbances are known as resonances and may be caused by moons not yet discovered or by the known moon, Weywot. This phenomenon is not new and has led to the discovery of planets. In recent years, for example, data on peculiar orbital patterns for some objects beyond the orbit of Neptune have accumulated, leading to the postulation of the existence of even a new planet, Planet X, in the confines of the Solar System.

Cosmic Void is a section in which our knowledge about the universe is presented in a qualitative and quantitative way. It is intended to explain the importance of understanding the cosmos not only from a scientific point of view but also from a philosophical, social and economic point of view. The name “cosmic vacuum” refers to the fact that the universe is and is, for the most part, empty, with less than one atom per cubic meter, despite the fact that in our environment, paradoxically, there are quintillions of atoms per meter cubic, which invites us to reflect on our existence and the presence of life in the universe. The section is made up of Pablo G. Perez Gonzalezresearcher at the Center for Astrobiology; Eva Villaver, researcher at the Center for Astrobiology; and Patricia Sanchez Blazquezfull professor at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM).

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