Rings of Neptune 1846 when William Lassell, the discoverer of Neptune's largest moon, Triton, thought he had seen a ring around the planet. However, his claim was never confirmed and it is likely that it was an observational artifact. The first reliable detection of a ring was made in 1968 by stellar occultation, although that result would go unnoticed until 1977 when the rings of Uranus were discovered. Soon after the Uranus discovery, a team from Villanova University led by Harold J. Reitsema began searching for rings around Neptune. On 24 May 1981, they detected a dip in a star's brightness during one
Definition of planet in composition, size, and orbital characteristics. They concluded that they had discovered the long-hypothesised Kuiper belt (sometimes called the Edgeworth–Kuiper belt), a band of icy debris that is the source for "short-period" comets—those with orbital periods of up to 200 years. Pluto's orbit lay within this band and thus its planetary status was thrown into question. Many scientists concluded that tiny Pluto should be reclassified as a minor planet, just as Ceres had been a century earlier. Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology suggested that a "planet" should be redefined as "any body in the Solar System that