James Webb reveals Chariklo’s mysterious rings are changing faster than expected

For most of modern astronomy, rings were associated only with the Solar System's giant planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. That picture changed in 2013, when astronomers discovered two dense rings around Chariklo, a small object only about 250 kilometers across that travels between Saturn and Uranus, nearly 17 times farther from the Sun than Earth.

Now, new observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) show that those rings are not as stable as scientists once assumed. A study published in Science Advances, led by the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC), provides the first evidence that Chariklo's ring system has changed over a period of only a few years.

James Webb Detects Changes in Chariklo's Rings