Long ago, something happened to Haumea.
Something large smashed into the world, rendering it unable to fall back into a circular shape because of its small size. Instead, it more has the dimensions of an ellipse or grain of rice. The collision also left behind a few small moons and a trail of debris. And, as a paper published Wednesday in
Nature demonstrates, it left behind a ring of material, too.
This isn’t the first small solar system body discovered to have a ring. 10199 Chariklo, which is the largest of a class of objects called “centaurs” hiding out between Saturn and Uranus, has a ring, as does fellow centaur 2060 Chiron. Both those worlds are on the smaller end of the dwarf planet spectrum. Haumea, on the other hand, is roughly six times bigger than Chariklo, making it way smaller than our Moon but now the fifth-largest object in the solar system to have a ring, after Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.