  The Centaur population is composed by minor bodies wandering between the
giant planets and that frequently perform close gravitational encounters with
these planets, which leads to a chaotic orbital evolution. Recently, the
discovery of two well-defined narrow rings was announced around the Centaur
10199 Chariklo. The rings are assumed to be in the equatorial plane of Chariklo
and to have circular orbits. The existence a well-defined system of rings
around a body in such perturbed orbital region poses an interesting new
problem. Are the rings of Chariklo stable when perturbed by close gravitational
encounters with the giant planets? Our approach to address this question
consisted of forward and backward numerical simulations of 729 clones of
Chariklo, with similar initial orbits, for a period of 100 Myrs. We found, on
average, that each clone suffers along its lifetime more than 150 close
encounters with the giant planets within one Hill radius of the planet in
question. We identified some extreme close encounters able to significantly
disrupt or to disturb the rings of Chariklo. About 3% of the clones lose the
rings and about 4% of the clones have the ring significantly disturbed.
Therefore, our results show that in most of the cases (more than 90%) the close
encounters with the giant planets do not affect the stability of the rings in
Chariklo-like systems. Thus, if there is an efficient mechanism that creates
the rings, then these structures may be common among these kinds of Centaurs.
