Pluto May Have a Dust Ring

According to the latest theoretical calculations, the dwarf planet Pluto should have a dust ring companion revolving around it. Scientists base their proposal on a computer model that analyzes the object's behavior in orbit.

If such a structure is found and confirmed, then the discovery would be very important towards understanding how planets form. When the first rings were discovered in our solar system, astronomers believed that the structures were rare manifestation.

Saturn's ring system was discovered long ago, but it wasn't until the 1960s and the 1970s that additional rings were found around Uranus, Neptune and Jupiter. With these discoveries, experts began to suspect that these features were a lot more common then they first anticipate.

Finding such structures around Pluto – a dwarf planet – would indicate that this is indeed the case. Thus far, dust rings were never discovered around such a small object. The inner rocky planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars – do not feature such companions.

At this point, the best possible images we have a Pluto are the ones snapped using the Hubble Space Telescope. The renowned observatory was also the one who recently discovered the planet's fourth moon, currently known as P4.

However, the team behind the new study proposes that the dust ring is simply to faint for the telescope to identify. The work was led by Brazilian researcher Pryscilla Maria Pires dos Santos, who is based at the UNESP-São Paulo State University.

The most significant piece of evidence the team has is that Pluto's smaller moons – Nix and Hydra – should have released large amount of dust after being bombarded by micrometeorites. Since the formation of the solar system, these impacts had more than enough time to form a ring.

According to the research team, all the dust would be imprinted a rotation motion due to the interactions the dwarf planet has with solar winds. At the same time, the winds would also remove some of the dust, so the ring system could be instable.

The question that springs up then is whether the material making up the rings can be substituted as fast as it's being removed. The team calculates that the ring would be about 16,000 kilometers wide, and that solar winds would remove about 50 percent of its mass during a standard year.

Even so, there would be sufficient dust left to form an extremely faint ring. “A tenuous ring […] can be maintained by the dust particles released from the surfaces of Nix and Hydra,” Pires dos Santos explains, as quoted by Technology Review.

The researchers conclude by saying that the NASA New Horizons spacecraft – which is currently heading to Pluto – should be capable of observing the ring from nearby. However, astronomers will have to wait until 2015 to confirm whether the structure exists or not.