Try to imagine Saturn without its distinctive rings. Now picture two large ice moons getting closer and closer together until – boom. chaos. What was solid is now liquid. Diamond shards scattered in the darkness. Many icy fragments fall near Saturn, stay there and dance around the gas giant in unison, eventually forming the body’s magnificent, heavy disks.
This amazing scene comes as part of an attempt to answer one of the greatest mysteries of the solar system: where did Saturn’s rings come from, and when were they formed?
A study published this week in Astrophysical Journaltends to the idea that they are not billions of years old, but were made in the recent astronomical past – perhaps by the collision of two modest the size Frost-spotted moons from only a few hundred million years ago.
“I’m sure it would have been cool to see if dinosaurs had a good enough telescope,” he said. Jacob Kegerisa research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, is one of the study’s authors.
Dr. Kegeris and his colleagues tested the younger rings hypothesis using research distributed in Britain using an advanced computing facility. This supercomputing system allowed researchers to repeatedly recreate this disaster in greater detail as well as its immediate effects, and they found this origin story to be plausible.
The team’s simulations may help scientists study the origins of not just Saturn’s rings, but all worlds. Saturn, with its countless moons, “can be considered a small solar system,” he said. Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, who was not involved in the new study. “Saturn is an ideal laboratory for understanding how planets and moons form.”
Saturn is 4.5 billion years old, almost older than the Sun. Its rings were thought to be similarly ancient until the Cassini spacecraft studied the planet closely for 13 years. Over billions of years, it would have been littered with other dusty space debris. But ice rings appeared Very shiny and clean To be primitive.
This, along with other evidence, has convinced many scientists studying Saturn that the rings appeared a few hundred million years ago. If they didn’t appear during the pandemonium of the early solar system when large objects routinely collided, then they formed in the relatively halcyon days of the recent astronomical past. but how?
Saturn now has at least 145 moons, and may have had many more before it developed rings. Scientists believe that the Sun’s enormous gravity may have gradually destabilized some of the moons’ orbits. It culminated in the collision of two moons.
The new study found that a collision between two icy satellites would cause lots of frozen confetti to explode toward Saturn. If this ice crossed and stayed beyond the Roche limit — the limit beyond which the planet’s gravitational tides cause the moons to break apart — it would have a chance to form those rings.
The fragments remaining after the maximum may have collided with other satellites, scattering them and releasing more material, the kind that can clump together to form newborn moons.
It’s not clear which of the current moons is considered a relative teenager. but RheaAn example of this might be Saturn’s second largest moon after Titan. If it were older, it would have lived through different gravity, and its orbit would be more skewed. But instead, Rhea is round and flat, suggesting that it formed very recently — perhaps built from that material recently released to make the Moon.
Some of Saturn’s moons may contain habitable subsurface oceans. But if those moons are younger than thought, this possibility could be reduced.
“We still don’t know what the chances are of life evolving there,” Dr. Kegeris said. But if some of these moons are younger than scientists think, that may reduce the chances of life being there.
The long-standing debate about the source of Saturn’s halos will not be settled by this study. But he emphasizes that rings are ephemeral and ever-changing, not static adornments.
“Whether it’s Saturn or somewhere else, I think it’s interesting how dramatic the solar system is,” Dr. Kegeris said.
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