The Roche phenomenon in the article is always an interesting one, for me. I know this will sound silly to most people here but my experience with the Bernoulli “explanation” for lift in aerofoils makes me feel a little uneasy about tidal forces in general.

I don’t mean that I find the Bernoulli explanation non-sensical — that’s a very common thing these days — more that the experience of listening to the falsehood presented as truth by so many people now means I am suspicious of other non-intuitive explanations.

In this specific case, I can’t get a good intuition about how tidal forces explain (1) Earth’s moon causing ocean bulges on both sides of Earth; and (2) tidal friction making Earth’s moon stop spinning and move further away. I feel like it’s one of those phenomena, like aerofoil lift, whose explanation is glossed over far too quickly given how odd the explanation is.

What's the probability that a moon was occluded? The star, the moon, and the Earth would have to be perfectly aligned on a straight line. It seems a vanishingly small probability. A dense asteroid belt seems more likely except that the star was only occluded once.

If it is an asteroid belt, maybe it is on a different (high inclination) plane, which is why the star only hit one part of it.

Previous related discussions:

Second ‘impossible’ ring found around distant dwarf planet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35762112 - April 2023 (61 comments)

Ring discovered around dwarf planet Quaoar confounds theories - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34714024 - Feb 2023 (1 comment)

Article in RNASS research notes https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/adfeda