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A ring system is a disc or torus orbiting an astronomical object that is composed of solid material such as gas, dust, meteoroids, planetoids or moonlets and stellar objects. Ring systems are best known as planetary rings, common components of satellite systems around giant planets such as of Saturn, or circumplanetary disks.
The main rings are, working outward from the planet, C, B and A, with the Cassini Division, the largest gap, separating Rings B and A. Several fainter rings were discovered more recently. The D Ring is exceedingly faint and closest to the planet. The narrow F Ring is just outside the A Ring. Beyond that are two far fainter rings named G and E.
Neptune's rings are named after astronomers who contributed important work on the planet: [2] Galle, Le Verrier, Lassell, Arago, and Adams. [3][4] Neptune also has a faint unnamed ring coincident with the orbit of the moon Galatea. Three other moons orbit between the rings: Naiad, Thalassa and Despina. [4]
The rings of Jupiter are a system of faint planetary rings. The Jovian rings were the third ring system to be discovered in the Solar System, after those of Saturn and Uranus. The main ring was discovered in 1979 by the Voyager 1 space probe [1] and the system was more thoroughly investigated in the 1990s by the Galileo orbiter. [2]
These rings were subsequently named the μ (mu) and ν (nu) rings. [16] The μ ring is the outermost of the pair, and is twice the distance from the planet as the bright η ring. [13] The outer rings differ from the inner narrow rings in a number of respects. They are broad, 17,000 and 3,800 km wide, respectively, and very faint.
Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun. It is a gaseous cyan -coloured ice giant. Most of the planet is made of water, ammonia, and methane in a supercritical phase of matter, which astronomy calls "ice" or volatiles. The planet's atmosphere has a complex layered cloud structure and has the lowest minimum temperature (49 K (−224 °C; − ...
Celestial spheres. The celestial spheres, or celestial orbs, were the fundamental entities of the cosmological models developed by Plato, Eudoxus, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus, and others. In these celestial models, the apparent motions of the fixed stars and planets are accounted for by treating them as embedded in rotating spheres made of ...
The rings of Chariklo are a set of two narrow rings around the minor planet 10199 Chariklo. Chariklo, with a diameter of about 250 kilometres (160 mi), is the second-smallest celestial object with confirmed rings (with 2060 Chiron being the smallest [1]) and the fifth ringed celestial object discovered in the Solar System, after the gas giants ...