Ring System Around Pluto?

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With the New Horizons spacecraft on its way to Pluto, there may be an intriguing additional task for the mission’s science team: look for a potential ring around Pluto and its moons. Researchers at The Universidade Estadual Paulista in Brazil have recently submitted a paper for publication in which they explore the possibility of a ring system around the Pluto-Charon system.  In their paper, the team discusses the effects of micrometeoroid impacts on Nix and Hydra and how the resulting dust particles could form a ring around Pluto.  The team also investigates forces, such as the solar wind, which would dissipate said ring system.

Pryscilla Maria Pires dos Santos and her team provide an exhaustive list of calculations in their paper which estimates the ring system to have a diameter of nearly 16,000 kilometers – well outside the orbits of Nix and Hydra.  Based on their calculations, Pires dos Santos state that despite nearly 50% of the ring’s mass being dissipated within a year, a tenuous ring system can be maintained by the dust expelled by micrometeoroid impacts.

Additional data presented in the paper places the rings “optical depth” as being several orders of magnitude fainter than even Jupiter’s rings. (Yes, Jupiter has a ring system!)  While ground-based observatories and even the Hubble Space Telescope haven’t detected the ring system Pires dos Santos et al. are hopeful that the New Horizons mission will provide data to validate their theoretical models. New Horizons has a dust counter capable of measuring dust grains with a minimum mass of 10^-12 grams, which should provide the data required to support or refute the team’s models.

Pires dos Santos mentions: “It is worth to point out that the interplanetary environment in the outer Solar System is not well known. Many assumptions have to be made in order to estimate a normal optical depth of a putative ring encompassing the orbits of Nix and Hydra.”

If you’d like to read the full paper, you can access it  (for free) at: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1108/1108.0712v1.pdf

Source: arXiv:1108.0712v1 [astro-ph.EP]