This one is for the Astronomy buffs...

Full article here

http://www.nbcnews.com/sc...oop-n62266

Article taken from nbcnews.com

BY ALAN BOYLE

When astronomers got a rare look at an asteroid passing in front of a distant star last year, they discovered something rarer still: the first asteroid with rings. Telltale variations in light show that the space rock, known as Chariklo, has two dense, narrow rings. That makes it only the fifth ringed world known to exist in the solar system, after Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune.

"We weren't looking for a ring and didn't think small bodies like Chariklo had them at all, so the discovery — and the amazing amount of detail we saw in the system — came as a complete surprise!" Felipe Braga-Ribas of Brazil's Observatorio Nacional/MCTI said in a news release announcing the find.

An artist's conception shows the icy asteroid Chariklo and its rings, which are 4 miles and 2 miles (7 kilometers and 3 kilometers) wide and separated by a 6-mile-wide (9-kilometer-wide) gap. The ring system extends about 500 miles (810 kilometers) in diameter.

Braga-Ribas planned the campaign to observe Chariklo, and he's also the lead author of a paper on the asteroid's rings published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

Chariklo, a 160-mile-wide (258-kilometer-wide) world named after a nymph in Greek mythology, orbits between Saturn and Uranus and is the largest of a class of objects known as Centaurs. Astronomers calculated that Chariklo would eclipse the star UCAC4 248-108672 on June 3, 2013, as seen from South America. So they flocked to several southern locations to catch the show.

Braga-Ribas and his colleagues recorded the dip in starlight as the asteroid passed over — as well as two additional dips, a few seconds before and again a few seconds after the main event. That's what tipped them off about the rings.

That's interesting, only the gas giants had rings. But Saturn's still the true beauty.