
Astronomers Surprised to Find Asteroid With Rings - platz
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/03/asteroid-ring-system
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incision
That we can predict the alignment and make observations of such unimaginably
distant objects never ceases to amaze me. There's just something - I don't
know - satisfying about the collective drive to figure things out and
accumulate knowledge.

Also, this discovery puts me in mind of my favorite new science fiction
series, The Expanse [0].

0:
[https://www.goodreads.com/series/56399-expanse](https://www.goodreads.com/series/56399-expanse)

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r721
ESO press release:
[http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1410/](http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1410/)

Paper:
[http://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/es...](http://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/eso1410/eso1410a.pdf)

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skywhopper
I'm surprised this is a surprise. There are asteroids/minor planets with
moons. Why not rings?

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tdaltonc
If you put a ring on an asteroid, i think that everyone would agree that it
would stay there. What's surprising is that the dominate theories of ring
formation don't really allow for something this small to form rings. Too small
for tidal forces. Weak gravity would mean it's hard to hold the products of a
collision. If the asteroid has shepherd satellites, they would be even weaker.

At least, that's why I'm surprised.

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sitkack
Not if the asteroid passed through a comet tail, esp tangentially, it could
easily capture water ice which would condense to a ring. Look at the gravity
on phobos and demios which are way smaller than this thing.

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tomphoolery
> The cosmic bling

...is the name of my new hip-hop group

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Roboprog
Captured & crushed Kuiper belt object, perhaps tossed in by Neptune???

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chiph
Water Ice? Looks like a breadcrumb to me.

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chris_mahan
What do the other asteroids call him, the Lord of the Rings?

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luckyno13
He probably has the title of Ring Bearer.

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lukasm
You mean Ring Bear?

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eggoa
This new comment approval system is working out great.

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lukasm
No more jokes on HN?

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chc
HN has _never_ been a very good environment for jokes. One of the big goals of
HN was to optimize for signal, both quality and quantity. Jokes are noise. If
you want to do Reddit-style pun threads, you can go to one of the many
subreddits that welcomes those. There is no shortage of places to find jokes
on the Internet, but there is a severe lack of places where you can find
thoughtful comments by knowledgeable people.

Paul Graham wrote in one of his essays about Hacker News:

 _The most dangerous form of stupid comment is not the long but mistaken
argument, but the dumb joke. … Whatever the cause, stupid comments tend to be
short. And since it 's hard to write a short comment that's distinguished for
the amount of information it conveys, people try to distinguish them instead
by being funny._

 _… Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly. Comments have much
more effect on new comments than submissions have on new submissions. If
someone submits a lame article, the other submissions don 't all become lame.
But if someone posts a stupid comment on a thread, that sets the tone for the
region around it. People reply to dumb jokes with dumb jokes._

(What I've Learned From Hacker News:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html))

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teemo_cute
I agree. Sometimes, though, a properly inserted joke can dissolve heated
arguments. In NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) it's called a 'Pattern
Interrupt.'

