Rings of Uranus - Discovery

Discovery

The first mention of a Uranian ring system comes from William Herschel's notes detailing his observations of Uranus in the 18th century, which include the following passage: "February 22, 1789: A ring was suspected". Herschel drew a small diagram of the ring and noted that it was "a little inclined to the red". The Keck Telescope in Hawaii has since confirmed this to be the case, at least for the ν ring. Herschel's notes were published in a Royal Society journal in 1797. However, in the two centuries between 1797 and 1977 the rings are rarely mentioned, if at all. This casts serious doubt on whether Herschel could have seen anything of the sort while hundreds of other astronomers saw nothing. Still, it has been claimed by some that Herschel gave accurate descriptions of the ν ring's size relative to Uranus, its changes as Uranus travelled around the Sun, and its color.

The definitive discovery of the Uranian Rings was made by astronomers James L. Elliot, Edward W. Dunham, and Douglas J. Mink on March 10, 1977, using the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, and was serendipitous. They planned to use the occultation of the star SAO 158687 by Uranus to study the planet's atmosphere. However, when their observations were analyzed, they found that the star disappeared briefly from view five times both before and after it was eclipsed by the planet. They deduced that a system of narrow rings was present. The five occultation events they observed were denoted by the Greek letters α, β, γ, δ and ε in their papers. These designations have been used as the rings' names since then. Later they found four additional rings: one between the β and γ rings and three inside the α ring. The former was named the η ring. The latter were dubbed rings 4, 5 and 6—according to the numbering of the occultation events in one paper. Uranus's ring system was the second to be discovered in the Solar System, after that of Saturn.

The rings were directly imaged when the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew through the Uranian system in 1986. Two more faint rings were revealed, bringing the total to eleven. The Hubble Space Telescope detected an additional pair of previously unseen rings in 2003–2005, bringing the total number known to 13. The discovery of these outer rings doubled the known radius of the ring system. Hubble also imaged two small satellites for the first time, one of which, Mab, shares its orbit with the outermost newly discovered ring.