– (NASA/JPL/USGS/Playback)
Until today, scientists are not sure of the origin of the gigantic rings, but some theories try to explain their appearance.
The main one points out that the rings, discovered in 1610 by the Italian Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), would be the remains of a moon of Saturn, destroyed after the collision with another celestial body, or pieces of a comet that approached the planet and fragmented it. if before hitting it.
If the initial event is still a mystery, the ring formation process is already better known. In any case, since they were sighted for the first time, they have attracted the attention of the scientific community for their beauty and peculiarity, which gives Saturn a unique profile in the solar system.
Although Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune also have rings, they are less numerous and much more tenuous than those of Saturn, the star of sidereal “jewelry” 🙂
hazy origin
Millions of years ago, an immense celestial body about 200 kilometers in diameter broke up on the outskirts of Saturn. It is believed to have been a moon of the planet itself – destroyed after colliding with any other star – or a comet that broke up when approaching Saturn.
It so happens that, around the planets, there is a “frontier” known as the Roche limit, which is the maximum distance that a star can approach a planet and remain intact. When a body crosses this boundary, it disintegrates. Our Moon, for example, just doesn’t crack because it’s outside the Earth’s Roche limit.
– (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Handout)
Fragmentation occurs because of a secondary effect of the force of gravity, a phenomenon known as tidal force – although it is not strong enough to pull the body to the surface, it is capable of shattering comets, asteroids and even larger structures, like satellites.
Over thousands of years, the larger fragments would have acquired different speeds and continued to collide with each other, generating a large fragmentation that ended up occupying all available space around it.
The shrapnel grouped into seven large rings, named by the letters D, C, B, A, F, G and E – from the closest (D, 68,000 kilometers from the planet) to the most distant (E, 180,000 kilometers) . They are named alphabetically in the order in which they were discovered (A was first) and subdivide into thousands of other thinner rings.
The relative stability of the rings’ orbit is thanks to Saturn’s satellites that they are close to and whose gravitational pull helps hold the rings together. The planet has no fewer than 60 known moons.
Rings are separated by spaces. This is the case of the Cassini Division, a hole 4,700 kilometers wide between the B and A rings, named after its discoverer, the French astronomer Jean Dominique Cassini (1625-1712). It is believed that the gravitational effect of the moon Mimas is that it maintains this gap between the rings.
With time – and due to the successive collisions and the difference in speed between the particles –, the rings were molded until they reached an inclination close to zero, remaining in orbit on the “Equator” line of Saturn.
Currently, the rings are formed by fragments of dust, rock and ice, whose size varies from a grain of sand to the size of a house. Although the rings are huge – the outermost one, for example, is about 300,000 km wide – their thickness does not exceed a few hundred meters.
– (NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope/Playback)
gas planet
Check out the structure and some curiosities of Saturn
– Its atmosphere is mainly composed of hydrogen mixed with small amounts of helium and methane.
– The outermost layer of the planet is made up of gaseous hydrogen.
– There is a portion formed by liquid hydrogen melted at high temperatures. Next comes a layer of metallic hydrogen. The core is formed by a dense “cold soup” of rock, ice and other compounds such as iron sulfide and oxide.
– Sixth planet from the Sun, Saturn is the second largest in the solar system, with an equatorial circumference of 378,600 kilometers (about ten times that of Earth)
– Although gigantic, Saturn is the only planet in the solar system less dense than water. If it were dipped into a giant ocean, it would float!