A RARE edge-on alignment of Uranus’s rings as seen from Earth has revealed extensive changes since the Voyager 2 probe observed them in 1986.
Voyager 2 photographed Uranus’s major rings, thought to be made of chunks of rock, along with some wispy dust rings. In 2003, the Hubble Space Telescope revealed two new dust rings.
Imke de Pater of the University of California, Berkeley, and her team have now taken infrared images of the dust rings using the 10-metre Keck II telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. They found that one dust ring seen by Voyager 2, called the zeta ring,…
