The European Space Agency's CHEOPS telescope recently discovered a large ring around the dwarfplanet Quaoar which has researchers intrigued.
The European Space Agency’s CHEOPS telescope usually searches for planets outside our solar system, but recently it made a discovery closer to home: a large ring around the dwarf planet Quaoar which has researchers intrigued.
Because of the planet’s small size and far distance from the sun, it is hard to observe even using a powerful space-based telescope like CHEOPS. To observe the dwarf planet, researchers had to wait until it passed in front of distant background stars and blocked out their light in events called occultations. But these events are rare and hard to predict.
It took several attempts, but the team was able to observe an occultation and were very pleased with the results. “The Cheops data are amazing for signal to noise,” Pagano said.
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