Saturn's Rings: Leftovers From a Cosmic Murder?

WASHINGTON –  One of the solar system's most mindful mysteries — the lineage of Saturn's rings — haw be a housing of cosmic murder, newborn investigate suggests.

The victim: an unnamed slug of Saturn that disappeared most 4.5 1000000000 eld ago.

The suspect: a round of gas pedal that erst enclosed Saturn when its mountain of moons were forming, but has today fled the evildoing scene.

And those impressive and flaming rings are the exclusive grounds left. As the sure slug prefabricated its modification spiral, Saturn robbed its outmost place of ice, which then bacilliform rings, according to a newborn theory publicised online Sun in the book Nature.

"Saturn was an helper and that produced the rings," said think communicator Robin Canup, an physicist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.

The perplexity of Saturn's rings "has puzzled grouping for centuries," said philanthropist physicist Joe Burns, who wasn't participating in the think and said Canup's newborn theory makes sense.

One of the directive theories has been that either whatever of Saturn's some moons crashed into apiece other, or an angulate crashed into whatever of them — leaving detritus that bacilliform the rings. The pain is Saturn's moons are half cover and half sway and the planet's heptad rings are today as such as 95 proportionality cover and belike utilised to be every ice, Canup said. If the rings were bacilliform by a moon-on-moon break or an asteroid-on-moon, there would be more rocks in the rings.

Something had to hit empty absent the outmost cover of a moon, a bounteous moon, Canup said.

So her theory starts zillions of eld past when the planets' moons were forming. A super round of gas pedal circled Saturn and that helped both create and defeat moons. Large intrinsic moons belike prefabricated lawful plunges into the planet, pulled by the round of gas.

These modification spirals took most 10,000 eld and the key to discernment the rings' origins is what happened to them during that time. According to Canup's machine model, Saturn empty the cover absent from a Brobdingnagian slug patch it was farther sufficiency from the follower that the cover would be unfree in a ring.

The example rings were 10 to 100 nowadays large than they are now, but over instance the cover in the outmost rings has coalesced into whatever of Saturn's tiny intrinsic moons, Canup said. So what began as moons has embellish rings and then newborn moons.

This helps vindicate Tethys, an mismatched intrinsic slug that didn't quite sound another slug manufacture theories, she said. Saturn has 62 moons — 53 of them hit names. New ones are unconcealed regularly by NASA's Cassini probe.

But this doesn't vindicate rings on another planets in our solar system, much as Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus, which belike bacilliform in a assorted way, Canup said.

The rings and ice-rich intrinsic moons are the terminal extant remnants of this forfeited moon, "which is pretty neat," Canup said.

Burns said Canup's theory explains the onerous cover components of rings meliorate than another possibilities. Larry Esposito, who unconcealed digit of Saturn's rings, praised the newborn essay as "a rattling clever, example idea."

"I would call it more same cosmic recycling," Esposito said because the slug became rings which then became moons. "It's not so such a test demise, but a cosmic try to reuse materials again and again."

keywords: saturn,rings,cosmic,years,moons,outer,which,formed,theory,canup,other,planet,probably,would,inner,canup said,inner moons