Rings of Saturn Formed by Collision of 2 Ancient Icy Moons Based on Data From NASA’s Cassini Mission [Study]

Saturn has the most beautiful ring in the solar system. However, the rings of Saturn had left researchers scratching their heads until a recent study explained how the sixth planet got its beautiful rings.

Rings of Saturn A Result of Icy Moon Collision

A recent study may have solved the origin of Saturn's rings. Based on numerous computer models, the research used information gathered from NASA's Cassini mission, which spent 13 years orbiting Saturn between 2004 and 2017. The probe discovered the icy pieces that make up the rings, which Galileo Galilei originally noticed in 1610, are extremely pure and unpolluted by dust. These Cassini discoveries suggested that Saturn's famous rings are probably only a few million years old and that, for most of the solar system's 4.5 billion-year history, the famous Saturn had a much blander appearance.

The team behind the new study, including scientists from Durham University and NASA, hypothesized that the rings would have resulted from two old, frozen moons colliding. They ran nearly 200 different simulations of such a collision on powerful supercomputers.

The findings suggested that the existence of those rings could be explained by a collision between two moons roughly as huge as Saturn's current moons, Dione and Rhea, which have diameters similar to one-third and just under half of Earth's moon, respectively.

According to Vincent Eke, Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University, they tested a hypothesis for the recent formation of Saturn's rings. They found that an impact of icy moons sent enough material near Saturn to form its visible rings.

Scientists believe Saturn's icy moons have rocky cores even though the rings are virtually entirely ice-formed. The calculations proved that the icy and rocky pieces would scatter differently following a collision, allowing the rocks to form new moons and the ice to disperse in orbits closer to Saturn's surface.

Only inside the Roche limit, a region where the gravitational pull of the orbiting material is smaller than the tidal forces of the body it circles, may rings develop around celestial bodies.

According to the calculations, many fictitious collisions would inject a lot of ice into lower altitudes while clumping rocks into higher orbits.

This situation naturally results in rings rich in ice because, when the progenitor moons collide, the rock in their cores is scattered more unevenly than the ice, according to Eke.

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Saturn's Ring System

Saturn's ring system expands to 175,000 miles (282,000 kilometers) from the planet. Its vertical height is estimated to be roughly 30 feet (10 meters). The rings are generally close to one another, except for the Cassini Division, a chasm of 2,920 miles (4,700 kilometers) in width that separates Rings A and B.

The rings are named alphabetically in the order they were discovered. A, B, and C are the three major rings. The rings D, E, F, and G are relatively recent discoveries and are fainter.

The D ring, C ring, B ring, Cassini Division, A ring, F ring, G ring, and finally, the E ring are the outermost rings, starting at Saturn and traveling outward. The extremely weak Phoebe ring is in the orbit of its moon Phoebe, hence the name.