When we think of asteroids, we often think of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that contains the majority of the known asteroids in our solar system. However, our solar system hosts several other populations of asteroids and icy rocks, including the Jupiter Trojan asteroids that orbit in Jupiter\u2019s orbit, and the icy bodies and comets of the Kuiper Belt. But there\u2019s one population of asteroids that often gets overlooked called Centaurs, primarily because their orbits are not in a fixed location and instead whose orbits cross the orbits of the outer planets. <\/p>\n
But one Centaur called Chariklo stands out not only because it\u2019s the largest known Centaur with a radius of 125 kilometers (78 miles), but because it is the only Centaur to have a ring system, with Chariklo and its ring system discovered in 1997 and 2013, respectively. Now, an international team of more than two dozen researchers might have discovered how this ring system could have changed in recent years. As they discuss in a recent study<\/a> published in Science Advances, the researchers present evidence that Chariklo\u2019s two rings might be gaining and losing material. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n To determine this, the researchers used a common technique called stellar occultation, which has been used for observations of Chariklo\u2019s ring system in 2017 and 2022 using ground-based telescopes and NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), respectively. The 2017 study established a baseline regarding the rings\u2019 composition and sizes, while the 2022 study used JWST to observe Chariklo and its rings. It was determined that the inner ring was denser than the outer ring. While Chariklo is about 125 kilometers in radius, the inner ring (C1R) and outer ring (C2R) orbit about 265 kilometers (165 miles) and 280 kilometers (174 miles) from Chariklo\u2019s surface, respectively. <\/p>\n