The European Space Agency’s CHEOPS telescope recently discovered a large ring around the dwarf planet 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.
The ring was spotted around the dwarf planet Quaoar, located in the Kuiper belt around 44 times farther from the sun than the Earth is. The planet itself is small, at just 690 miles across, but the ring around it is much larger — at seven and a half times its radius.
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.
