Strange Dwarf Planet Gets Even Stranger

The dwarf planet Haumea, orbiting out in the Kuiper Belt, is an interesting place. For one, there's a big pink spot on its surface, the origin of which is a complete mystery. Then things get really weird. Haumea is a fairly big Kuiper Belt Object with about a third of the mass of Pluto. The length of its longest axis is over 2,300 kilometers, almost equal to that of Pluto, but the average radius is 700 kilometers, 500 less than Pluto's. So, what's going on? Well, despite being big enough for gravity to pull Haumea into a sphere, it isn't. It looks more like this.

Why does it look like a football? We're not completely sure, but considering Haumea makes a full rotation in 4 hours (faster than any other object larger than 100 kilometers), that may have something to do with it.

So, what new news could we have gotten from this icy little football world? It's simple, really, Haumea also has rings. According to observation, this ring system is 43 miles wide, and orbits about 620 miles above the surface. My question, which isn't really addressed, is whether or not the ring system would be circular or oval shaped. I'm guessing circular, and the distance either varies or the rings are aligned so that they could always be 620 miles away. Oval shaped rings would be weird. Anyway, this just adds another mystery to this little dwarf planet which I can't imagine will get a definitive answer anytime soon. Do you see us sending a spacecraft there in the next 50 years? I don't. It's a long way away, and there are a lot bigger questions other than "why is this place football-shaped, and why does it have rings?"

Saturn's Moons May Be Younger Then They Look

Here's a story to file under "Unlikely but interesting to think about". Research has been published showing that many of the moons of Saturn are not actually 4 billion years old, but only about 100 million years old. The study suggests that the tidal forces governing the Saturnian moon system and gravitational interactions between moons should very quickly force out inner moons into longer orbits. Models were run to predict how far out the inner moons should have moved out, and were compared to where the moons actually are. Of course, they don't match up. According to the model, the inner moons such as Tethys, Dione, and Rhea are much closer than they should be to Saturn if they are in fact 4 billion years old, and actually haven't moved much at all.

To get a more exact date, the researchers looked at Enceladus. Assuming that the amount of tidal flexing and thus the level of geothermal activity was constant, the scientists were able to estimate just how strong the tidal forces around Saturn are. Using this information and computer models, they estimated that Enceladus had moved from its original orbit to its current one in only 100 million years, making the moon very, very young. The researchers guess that something drastic happened 100 million years ago, reshaping the moons that were present into what we see today while also creating Saturn's dramatic ring system. Now, if Enceladus really is that young, that's bad news for finding any life there. 100 million years, while long on a human scale, is really not enough time for life to develop. But I'm just a bit doubtful about this particular theory. It's interesting, yes, but I think there are too many holes for it to be correct.

Exoplanet with Rings Discovered

What? It most certainly hasn't been two months since the last post, what are you talking about?

And you thought these rings were impressive.

Anyway,  scientists found an exoplanet orbiting the star 1SWASP J140747.93-394542.6 (what a catchy name) a few years back. Nothing unusual about that, but after a closer look, things got a bit baffling. Ordinarily, when a planet transits in front of a star, the star dims once, and then brightens again. Old J1407, as I am henceforth calling, was not dimming like that. It would dim and brighten many times in succession. They figured out it was a ring system orbiting the planet, J1407b, back in 2012, but at the time, they thought there were only 4 rings.

As it turned out, they slightly underestimated. Apparently this planet has 37 rings, with a radius of 0.6 AU. That means Earth's entire orbit would fit with this ring system. They have an estimated mass of 100 times the mass of the moon, and a gap 0.4 AU out is big enough that a Mars or even Earth-sized object could be orbiting inside. It should be noted that this planet is very young, less than 20 million years, and these rings are not going to last long. Astronomically long, that is. Eventually, those rings will disappear as moons appear, but with that much mass contained in the rings, there could be some pretty big moons. The planet's a bit too far out for any Earth-sized moon to be potentially habitable, which is too bad, but the idea of seeing a ring system that ridiculously oversized would probably make J1407b quite the tourist destination. Now, all we need is interstellar travel...