A new study suggests that the collision of two ancient icy moons that once orbited Saturn may have given rise to the planet’s iconic ring system.

Saturn is probably the most attractive planet in the solar system, but it may also be one of the most striking; A gas giant second in size after Jupiter, surrounded by a family of concentric rings and orbiting an army of 245 moons. It has puzzled astronomers for centuries.

A new study may have found the answer to one of Saturn’s mysteries: the origin of its rings. The study, based on dozens of computer simulations, used data collected by NASA’s Cassini mission, which orbited Saturn for 13 years from 2004 to 2017. The probe found that the material forming the rings, first discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610, consists of an icy mass. These Cassini discoveries showed that Saturn’s iconic rings must be quite young, only a few million years old, and that for most of the Solar System’s 4.5 billion year history, iconic Saturn did not look any better.

The researchers behind the new study, a team of experts from NASA and Durham University in the United Kingdom, suggested that the rings may have formed from a relatively recent collision between two ancient icy moons. They used powerful supercomputers to simulate almost 200 scenarios of such a collision.

The results showed that the collision of two moons approximately the size of Saturn’s current moons Dione and Rhea (with diameters equal to one-third and slightly less than half that of Earth’s moon, respectively) could explain the existence of these rings.

“We tested a hypothesis about the recent formation of Saturn’s rings and found that the impact of icy moons could have sent enough material close to Saturn to form the rings we see now,” said physics professor Vincent Ecke. In the statement, it was stated that the Institute of Computational Cosmology at Durham University.

Although the rings are mostly composed of ice, scientists believe Saturn’s icy moons have a rocky core. Simulations confirmed that icy fragments and rock fragments would disperse in different ways after the impact, allowing rocks to coalesce into new moons, while ice would disperse into orbits closer to Saturn’s surface.

Rings can form around celestial bodies only within the Roche limit; This limit is where the gravity of the orbiting material is weaker than the tidal forces of the body it orbits. Simulations show that many hypothetical impacts would eject large amounts of ice to lower altitudes, while rocks would stick together in higher orbits.

“This scenario naturally leads to the formation of ice-rich rings because when protomoons collide, the rocks in the cores of the colliding bodies are not dispersed as widely as the overlying ice,” Eke said. said.

Saturn’s icy moons are of great interest to scientists because some, such as tiny Enceladus, contain conditions suitable for life. Scientists still don’t know much about Saturn and its past, and the results of the research are only a small step towards unlocking the planet’s mysteries. Source