But Quaoar’s Roche limit is about 1,100 miles from its center. The dense ring orbits at 2,500 miles from the dwarf planet’s center.

Quaoar’s ring is producing some surprises for astronomers as it orbits beyond Pluto. Its diameter of about 700 miles (1,110 km) is about a third that of Earth’s moon and half that of the dwarf ...

However, observations of Quaoar taken with Cheops as well as ground-based telescopes reveal a ring at a distance of nearly 7.5 times the diameter of Quaoar, well outside of its Roche Limit.

With a radius of about 2,420 miles (3,885 km) from Quaoar's center, the ring is too far away from the dwarf planet that its gravity should no longer be able to keep the material dispersed.

Wow, scientists discovered that the dwarf planet Quaoar has a ring! It’s far enough away from Quaoar that scientists would have expected it to form into a moon. Read more about Quaoar's ring ...

Quaoar is a planetoid that lies beyond Pluto's orbit in the solar system. Its discovery in 2002, as well as subsequent discoveries of other small worlds, led to a new classification and the ...

An artist's conception of Quaoar and its small moon Weywot. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC-Caltech) Most of us are familiar with the larger planets in our solar system, but once we get to ...

Quaoar was discovered in 2002 but never made it onto the list of full-sized planets within the solar system. Despite this, it does have a bit in common with a few of the solar system's planets.

Photo courtesy of the European Space Agency Feb. 8 (UPI) -- Astronomers have discovered a ring around a dwarf planet called Quaoar in the outer reaches of the solar system.

Quaoar is an icy body about half the size of Pluto that’s located in the Kuiper Belt at the solar system’s edge (SN: 8/23/22). At such a great distance from Earth, it’s hard to get a clear ...

Recent telescope data revealed that a small planet in the far reaches of our solar system has a dense ring round it. And scientists are baffled as to why. The planet, Quaoar, is one of roughly ...

Elastic collisions may be possible if the ring particles have an icy outer coating, Dhillon said — something that is plausible, given Quaoar's location at the edge of the solar system.