In the early morning hours of January 21, 2017, many professional and amateur astronomers were pointing their telescopes to a star in the constellation Boötes (The Herdsman) with the unwieldy name of URAT1 533-182543, a typical star that had not inspired any special interest up until that very moment. So what happened on that day to place the star in the spotlight? For about 2 minutes, that star was occulted by Haumea, one of the largest icy bodies in the Solar System orbiting beyond Neptune, and a so-called “dwarf planet,” like Pluto.

Occultations have been used for decades to study details of many small bodies in the Solar System. Conceptually, they are just like total solar eclipses, when lucky witnesses on Earth see the Moon temporarily blot out the entire Sun. In that case, the observers are in the deepest part of the Moon’s shadow. In an occultation, instead of the Moon, there is an asteroid or other object, and instead of the Sun, there is a distant star. These occultations usually last just a few seconds or minutes, and so require careful planning to actually see. Most often, occultations are used to independently find the sizes and shapes of asteroids, properties that can be very difficult to determine otherwise. This is especially true with the very distant objects beyond Neptune, known as “trans-Neptunian objects,” or TNOs. Haumea, in addition to being a dwarf planet, is one of these TNOs.

Twelve telescopes at 10 different observatories around Europe managed to witness Haumea’s blockage of the star. But in addition to measuring Haumea’s properties, the observers saw something unexpected: Haumea has a ring! The discovery of the first ring system around a dwarf planet is a reminder that there are many fascinating worlds to explore in the outskirts of the Solar System.

Estela Fernández-Valenzuela, soon to be a post-doctoral researcher at the Florida Space Institute at UCF, participated in the Haumea occultation project and is a coauthor of this discovery.

“I worked in the planning of the observational campaign. A few days in advance of the phenomenon, we predicted that the shadow of this occultation was going to cross Europe, so we sent out an announcement and coordinated the observations. After the successful detection, I worked on modeling the effects that the ring has on the variation of Haumea’s brightness. This information is needed to determine the orientation of the rotation axis of the body.”

The group of researchers, led by José Luis Ortiz from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain, found that Haumea’s ring lies in the same plane as its equator and as the orbit of its outer moon, Hi’iaka. The ring has a radius of about 2,287 kilometers and a width of 70 km, lying at about 1,000 km from Haumea’s surface. They also found that Haumea is larger than previously estimated – its largest axis is about 2300 km long – and this implies that it is not as reflective or as dense as originally thought.

More details can be found in the Nature publication: “The size, shape, density and ring of the dwarf planet Haumea from a stellar occultation,” Nature 550, 219–223 (URL: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v550/n7675/full/nature24051.html?foxtrotcallback=true). A video with an artist’s conception of the Haumea system is also available (URL: https://youtu.be/TeUegAEbGxo).

This past summer, for the first time since 1918, people in the United States were able to experience a total solar eclipse that crossed the mainland from coast to coast. No total solar eclipse had even touched the continental United States since 1979, and we will have to wait until April 2024 for the next one. On August 21, 2017, the path of totality extended from Oregon to South Carolina. As you might expect of planetary scientists and astronomers, many UCF researchers from the Florida Space Institute and the Physics Department traveled around the USA to enjoy this rare spectacle. Read about some of their experiences at FSI’s website (URL https://fsi.ucf.edu/solar-eclipse-map/).

UCF will be hosting a solar eclipse viewing event on August 21. Check out the details on our website and on UCF Today.

June 30th is Asteroid Day, and our own Prof. Humberto Campins will be at the Kennedy Space Center to give a public talk about those rocks in the sky. Check out the story on UCF Today.

Check out the story on UCF Today about FSI Planetary Scientist Dr. Gal Sarid and a recent study of an unusual comet in the outer Solar System.

Dr. Addie Dove, an assistant professor in our group, has won this year’s Susan Mahan Niebur Early Career Award from NASA! Congratulations! The award will be formally presented at this summer’s Exploration Science Forum. Read more about the award and about Prof. Dove’s accomplishments at UCF Today.

An international collection of scientists who study asteroids, comets, and meteors met this week at the (appropriately named) Asteroids Comets Meteors 2017 conference in Montevideo, Uruguay. It is the most important such conference in the world for these researchers. A tradition at this approximately-triennial conference (first held in 1983) is to honor some of the researchers in the community by naming asteroids for them, and this year’s conference was no exception. Asteroid 10689, a.k.a. 1981 DZ1, is now officially named Pinillaalonso in honor of UCF’s very own Dr. Noemí Pinilla-Alonso, a planetary astronomer here at the Florida Space Institute. Additionally, asteroid 10282, a.k.a. 1981 ET46, is now officially named Emilykramer in honor of Dr. Emily Kramer, a scientist at Caltech/JPL who earned her Ph.D. at UCF in our group in 2014. Both asteroids are in the Main Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter. Pinillaalonso is about 13 to 14 kilometers in diameter; Emilykramer is about 2 to 4 kilometers in diameter.

Drs. Pinilla-Alonso and Kramer join a few other faculty at UCF — Drs. Britt, Campins, Fernández, Lugo, and Harrington — who have been similarly honored with asteroid names. In total, over a dozen current and former UCF personnel have been so honored.

A profile of one of our own professors, Dr. Addie Dove, is included in the Center for Success of Women Faculty‘s celebration of Women’s History Month! Give it a read!

A recent paper published by UCF researchers Leos Pohl and Prof. Dan Britt discussing how asteroid clays could work better than aluminum at protecting astronauts in deep space from radiation has been profiled in a recent article in New Scientist.

We’ve updated our website into a format that we hope will improve the user experience, ease navigation, and align better with UCF’s colors. Over the next few weeks we will be making sure our content is updated and that it has all ported over to this new site!

OSIRIS-REx is NASA’s New-Frontiers-class mission to visit a primitive asteroid and return a sample of it to Earth. Read about some of the UCF faculty and students who are involved with this exciting mission. The spacecraft is scheduled to launch from KSC on September 8.

Our graduate student, Jenna Crowell, has won the Best Student Poster Competition in the Planetary Science section at the recent Asia Oceania Geosciences Society annual conference, held in Beijing. Congratulations Jenna! She presented her research on thermophysical modeling of near-Earth asteroid 1627 Ivar.

Congratulations to our grad student expert on Saturn’s rings who successfully defended her dissertaiton in December. Tracy is now starting a postdoc at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio, TX.

Our two resident grad student exoplanet experts have successfully defended their dissertations and have left us for postdocs. Patricio is now in the planetary department at the University of Graz, Austria, and Jasmina is now in Abu Dhabi working at NYU’s campus there.

Kelsey Hargrove, has successfully defended her  PhD dissertation on near- and mid-IR characterization of primitive asteroids. Congratulations Dr. Hargrove!

The 46th Meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences — the premiere planetary science conference in the U.S. and arguably in the world — is happening this week in Tucson, Arizona. There are 21 UCF-led presentations at this meeting. 75% of our graduate students wilil be there to present talks and posters.

Nate Lust, one of our graduate students, has successfully defended his PhD dissertation on using new mathematical and statistical tehcniques to improve the signal-to-noise ratios and thus the interpretation of photometric data.  Congratulations Dr. Lust!

Robinson Observatory sponsored the make-up date for the International Observe the Moon Night. This was originally scheduled for September 6th but the event was clouded out. The make-up date had clear skies and the volunteers gave great views of the night sky to about 50 folks, both students and the general public.

Emily Kramer, one of our graduate students, has successfully defended her PhD dissertation. She will be moving on to a NASA Postdoctoral position at JPL to continue to do wonderful science. Congratulations Dr. Kramer!

NASA has selected UCF to host one of nine new “Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institutes”. This is a five-year, multi-million dollar institute that will be led by Prof. Dan Britt, and will involve many additional personnel at UCF as well as researchers and collaborators around the world. A description of the institutes can be found in the NASA press release. There’s also an article in Florida Today!