No, not the mythical half-man, half-horse...
though astronomers do seem to love Greek mythology. No, that would be crazy, and this wouldn't be a science post. The centaurs I'm talking about orbit the Sun between the gas giants Jupiter and Neptune. As their name hints, centaurs are a group of celestial objects that act much like asteroids and comets. They come in many shapes and sizes, a couple different colors, and they're all destined for glorious deaths.
Are they comets, asteroids, or dwarf planets?
Classification has proven to be a tricky thing, and the definition of a centaur varies among the astronomical organizations around the world. They're about the size of asteroids, the largest being about 150 miles in diameter, they exhibit a coma like a comet, and they've begun to coalecse like a planet... Much like the mythical being, these things are weird hybrids that defy what we know about how things work.
Because of their size and distance from earth, a confirmed centaur has never been photographed. There is, however, evidence that suggests Saturn's moon Phoebe is a centaur born in the Keiper Belt, which would mean the image on the right, taken by the Cassini mission, could be one of the best and only high resolution photos of one of these elusive objects.
Chariklo
There are thought to be over 40,000 centaurs in our solar system. The largest is known as Chariklo, named after a nymph from, you guessed it, Greek mythology.
It's the only one ever observed to have a system of rings, two to be exact. These rings have a clear void between them, leading to the belief that this tiny "planet" might even have a moon! This was discovered by watching the object pass in front of a particularly bright star. They expected to see one dip in the light as Chariklo passed in front of it. Unexpectedly, they saw five! The first and last two came in such a manner that scientists knew they weren't observing moons or a debris cloud.
Chariklo is the only object in our solar system other than the four gas giants to have a ring system at all, and their origin is still a mystery. The leading theory is that they formed after a collision ejected material that was held in orbit of the giant centaur.
A disastrous end.
One of the things centaurs have in common is they will all be gobbled up by one of the gas giants. They either have an orbit that crosses paths with one of the outer planets, or their orbit will be perturbed enough to pull it onto such a course. This is a fairly common occurrence, as it's widely believed that the outer gas giants actually protect the inner solar system by acting like vacuums that suck up most of the loose rocks flying in from the keiper belt and the Oort Cloud. The image below was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1994 when comet Shoemaker Levy-9 broke up and plunged into Jupiter.
Sources:
- http://www.eso.org/public/unitedkingdom/news/eso1410/
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaur_(minor_planet)
- https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-234
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