NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope had a bit of luck spotting frozen water in Chariklo’s rings.
Most discoveries have been made with a little luck by those who have tried very hard. Well, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope also had a bit of luck detecting frozen water in Chariklo’s rings. “Luckily, we’ve discovered that Chariklo is on track for such a paranormal event in October 2022. This is Webb’s first attempt at stargazing. A lot of hard work. Difficulties have been made to identify and refine predictions for this unusual event,” NASA said in a report.
Notably, in 2013, Felipe Braga-Ribas and others, using ground-based telescopes, discovered that Chariklo contains a system of two thin rings. Such rings are only expected around large planets like Jupiter and Neptune. “Astronomers observed a star as Chariklo passed in front of it, blocking the star’s light as they had predicted. Astronomers call the phenomenon a paranormal phenomenon. To their surprise In their natural course, the star blinked twice before disappearing behind Chariklo, and doubled – flashed again after the star reappeared.The flicker was caused by two thin rings – the first ever detected around a small star solar system subjects,” the research organization explained.
Chariklo is a small, icy object, but the largest of the known Centaur populations, located more than 2 billion miles beyond Saturn’s orbit. Chariklo is only 160 miles (250 km) long or ~51 times smaller than The earth diameter, and its rings orbit at a distance of about 250 miles (400 km) from the center of the celestial body.
On October 18, Webb’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument was used to closely monitor the star Gaia DR3 6873519665992128512 and monitor the drop in brightness indicating that an occult has occurred. Shadows produced by Chariklo’s rings have been clearly detected, demonstrating a new way of using Webb to explore objects in the solar system.
The star shadow, watched by Chariklo himself, had just disappeared from Webb’s view. Webb’s occultation light curve, a graph of the object’s luminosity over time, shows that the observations were successful! The rings were captured exactly as predicted. Mystical light curves will bring exciting new science to Chariklo’s rings.
The rings may consist of small particles of water ice mixed with dark matter, debris from an icy object that collided with Chariklo in the past. Chariklo is too small and too far away for even Webb to directly visualize the rings separated from the main body, so occults are the only tool for characterizing the rings themselves. .
Shortly after the paranormal occurred, Webb targeted Chariklo again, this time to collect observations of sunlight reflected by Chariklo and its rings (GTO Program 1272). The spectrum of the system shows three absorption bands of ice in the Chariklo system.
Noemi Pinilla-Alonso, Who led Webb’s spectroscopic observations of Chariklo, explaining: “The spectrum from ground-based telescopes was suggestive of this ice (Duffard et al. 2014), but the excellent quality of Webb’s spectroscopy was for the first time. revealed clear signs of ice crystallization.”
