Distant dwarf planet Quaoar shouldn’t have a ring, but it does

Scientists have discovered a ring system around a small object beyond the orbit of Neptune, a surprising discovery in itself. But the observation comes with a mystery to boot: How is this ring system possible when, by all accounts, it shouldn’t exist? “This ring is not where we would expect it to be,” Bruno Morgado, an astronomer at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and the lead author of a new paper published in the journal Nature, tells Popular Science in an email. “This may change what we know about how rings were formed.”