Photometric and spectroscopic evidence for a dense ring system around Centaur Chariklo

TL;DR

This study provides photometric and spectroscopic evidence supporting a dense icy ring system around Centaur Chariklo, explaining its brightness variability and spectral features through a changing aspect angle and detailed compositional analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a model explaining Chariklo's brightness and spectral variations via a ring system with a specific pole orientation, and details the composition of Chariklo and its rings.

Findings

Water ice feature observed in 2013 matches ring configuration.

Only one pole solution explains the photometry data.

Chariklo's surface is rich in amorphous carbon and silicates, with rings containing water ice and tholins.

Abstract

In this work we aim to study if the variability in the absolute magnitude of Chariklo and the temporal variation of the spectral ice feature, even its disappearance in 2007, can be explained by an icy ring system whose aspect angle changes with time. We modeled the light reflected by a system as the one described above to explain the variations on the absolute magnitude of Chariklo and its rings. Using X-Shooter at VLT we obtained a new reflectance spectra, here we compared this new set of data with the ones available in the literature. We showed how the water ice feature is visible in 2013 in accordance with the ring configuration, which had an opening angle of nearly 34$^o$ in 2013. Finally we also used models of the scattering of light to fit the visible and near-infrared spectra showing different characteristic to obtain information on the composition of Chariklo and its rings. {We showed that past absolute photometry of Chariklo from the literature and new photometric data that we obtained in 2013 can be explained by a ring of particles whose opening angle changes as a function of time. We used the two possible pole solutions for the ring system and found that only one of them, $\alpha$=151.30$\pm0.5$, $\delta=41.48\pm0.2$ $^o$ ($\lambda=137.9\pm0.5$, $\beta=27.7\pm0.2$ $^o$) provides the right variation of the aspect angle with time to explain the photometry, whereas the other possible pole solution fails to explain the photometry. From spectral modeling, using the result on the pole solution, we derived the composition of Chariklo surface and of that of the rings. Chariklo surface is composed by nearly 60% of amorphous carbon, 30% of silicates and 10\% of organics, no water ice was found on the surface. Whereas the ring contains 20% of water ice, 40-70% of silicates and 10-30% of tholins and small quantities of amorphous carbon.