The Rings of Pluto?
In the distant outer Solar System, rings are nearly ubiquitous. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune all have rings, leaving Pluto as the only outer planet without rings.
But PSI Senior Scientist Henry Throop would love to change that. Using both giant telescopes on Earth, and a small spacecraft currently on its way to Pluto, Throop is searching for signs that Pluto may have rings orbiting it, just like its neighbors. Astronomers expect that Pluto could well have rings – they’ve just never been discovered.
Throop presented results from one study at the Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Nantes, France in October 2011. In the study, Throop and his co-authors used data from the four-meter Anglo-Australian Telescope in Australia.
“From the ground, Pluto’s rings would be too faint and too small to see directly. But occasionally, Pluto passes in front of a distant star, and that lets us study it in exquisite detail,” Throop said. “As Pluto passes in front of the star, the star’s light blinks out, like a moth blocking out the beam from a flashlight. We searched through the observations to try to find any hint that the star light was being blocked by rings of Pluto.”
