The Mysterious Rings of Quaoar: Defying Traditional Understanding of Cosmic Bodies

Until now, we considered the formation of rings in cosmic bodies to be a fairly simple matter. If suitable material is brought into orbit around such a body at a suitable distance, a ring will form. This February, however, astronomers discovered a ring at the dwarf planet (50,000) Quaoar in the Kuiper belt, which does not fit into these standard ideas. He is somewhere else than he should be.

To make matters worse, a large international team of astronomers traced the second ring of Quaoar, which once again denies our previous hypotheses about the formation of rings of cosmic bodies. Their studies published professional journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. For every body in the Solar System there is a Roche limit, which results from the density of the given body and the density of the material in its orbit. Rings should only be created up to this limit and no further. However, this is clearly not the case for the dwarf planet Quaoar.

The Impossible Rings of Quaoar

Quaoar has an average size of about 1,100 kilometers and orbits the Sun at a distance of about 44 AU. It has its own system of orbits that make up the moon Weywot with a diameter of about 160 km. Weywot orbits the dwarf planet at a distance of about 14,500 kilometers, equivalent to about 13 Quaoar diameters.

The first of the discovered rings is more distant. It is located at a distance of about 4,050 kilometers from Quaoar. The second ring orbits the dwarf planet at a distance of 2,500 kilometers. However, both rings are much further than where the Roche limit is located in this case, which is about 1,780 kilometers from Quaoar.

TIP: Astronomers have discovered rings at the Kuiper belt dwarf planet Quaoar

How is it possible? Physicists believe that the explanation could be orbital resonance. This phenomenon is related to the orbits of bodies between which there is a gravitational coupling, i.e. resonance, and manifests itself in the fact that the orbital periods of the mentioned bodies correspond to ratios of small whole numbers. At the same time, we know that orbital resonance manifests itself in the arrangement of rings, although this is usually within the Roche limit.