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One of Jupiter's tenuous rings can be seen in this infrared image. (NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/Judy Schmidt) Given its similarities to its neighbor, Saturn, it seems natural to ask why Jupiter doesn't also have a magnificent, extensive system of visible rings. Alas, it's not the reality. While Jupiter does have rings, they're thin, tenuous, flimsy things of dust, visible only when back-lit by the Sun. According to new research, these discount rings lack bling because Jupiter's posse of chonky Galilean moons keep discs of rock and dust from accumulating the way they do around Saturn. "It's long bothered me why Jupiter doesn't have...

October 13, 2017 | David F. Coppedge Ring Around the Dwarf Planet Says ‘I’m Young’ You can’t declare something old just because your worldview requires it to be old. New Scientist declared in bold print, “Distant dwarf planet near Pluto has a ring that no one expected.” Reporter Ken Croswell, however, never explains why it was unexpected to find a prominent ring around the dwarf planet Haumea, located about 2 billion miles beyond the orbit of Pluto. When surprised by something that shouldn’t last for billions of years around a body smaller than Pluto, one strategy astronomers employ is to...

A unique opportunity to study the dwarf planet Haumea has led to an intriguing discovery: Haumea is surrounded by a ring. Add this to the already long list of unique things about the weird-shaped world with a dizzying rotation and a controversial discovery. On January 21, 2017 Haumea passed in front of a distant star, in an event known as an occultation. The background star can – pardon the pun – shine a light on the object passing in front, providing information about a distant object — such as size, shape, and density — that is otherwise difficult to obtain....

136108 Haumea — one of the strangest worlds of them all — was introduced into the solar system menagerie about ten years ago. Discovered by Mike Brown (@Plutokiller extraordinaire) and team in late December 2004 from the Palomar Observatory, Haumea (say HOW-meh) received its formal name on September 17, 2008 along with its dwarf planet designation. Haumea is a fast rotator, with a ‘day’ equal to about four hours. We know this due to periodic changes in brightness. Haumea also has a high albedo of about 80%, similar to freshly fallen snow. Models suggest that Haumea is about twice as...

Small objects could be rounded worlds, based on likely sizes, experts say. Three relatively bright space rocks recently found in Pluto's neighborhood may be new members of the dwarf planet family, astronomers say. The objects were discovered in a little studied section of the Kuiper belt, a region of the solar system that starts beyond the orbit of Neptune and extends 5.1 billion miles (8.2 billion kilometers) from the sun. Astronomer Scott Sheppard, of the Carnegie Institute of Washington, and colleagues found the bodies using the 1.3-meter Warsaw University Telescope at Las Campanas in Chile. The region of the Kuiper...

Radioactivity and gravity may be why the strange football-shaped dwarf planet known as Haumea and its moons are unexpectedly sheathed in crystalline ice, shining in space, researchers suggest. Haumea, named after the Hawaiian goddess of childbirth, orbits the sun beyond the path of Neptune, with two moons in orbit around it named Hi'iaka and Namaka, two of the deity's daughters. Haumea is a bizarre dwarf planet world shaped like a cigar, or perhaps an American football, measuring about 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) long, and makes one full rotation in less than four hours. This is one of the fastest rotation...

...when it was night time in the Canary Islands the sun was still high overhead in southern California. And the thing I was hoping to see only happened right then. If I had stayed home and waited eight hours to look later I would have seen nothing... that night the funny oblong fast spinning dwarf planet Haumea was passing directly in front of one of its satellites (Namaka is its name). If I could determine precisely when it happened and how long it lasted I could learn many things about Haumea (its size and crazy shape, maybe also its interior...

On December 28th, 2004, I discovered a Kuiper belt object brighter than anything anyone had ever seen before. Being only a few days after Christmas, I naturally nicknamed it Santa... How would I have known back in 2004 that Santa would be the single most interesting object ever discovered in the Kuiper belt? It has a moon -- wait, no, two moons! It is oblong, sort of like a football (American style) that has been deflated and stepped on. And it rotates end over end every 4 hours, significantly faster than anything else large known anywhere in the solar system......