by The discovery came in June 2013, when observers in Brazil, Chile and Argentina all trained their telescopes on Chariklo, a lumpy rock some 240 kilometres across that orbits the sun between Saturn and Uranus. As Chariklo crossed in front of a background star, they hoped to analyse its shape and maybe find evidence of comet-like jets of ice escaping its surface.
But within a day of the data arriving in the lab of Bruno Sicardy at the Paris Observatory, it started to look as if Chariklo had two narrow, sharply defined rings encircling its main body.
A little further on in the article:
Since then, the questions have only multiplied. Any rings around Chariklo should fall apart after just a few thousand years – so either we spotted them in an especially lucky cosmic instant, or some poorly understood process is keeping them together. And the rings aren’t sloppy, either. They are especially tight and neat, similar to those of Uranus.
Watch this space, as it were ... something very interesting is happening around that asteroid.
