Why do Planetary Rings Exist? | What Scientists Don't Tell You

 

Viewers surprise test time write down in the comments which planet in our solar system has a ring system around it was your answer Saturn well congrats you aren't wrong but you only answered one out of four planets that have rings around them if you answered Jupiter Neptune or Uranus you weren't wrong either because the

 correct answer is all four of these

 giant planets of our solar system have rings around them welcome to Science Reads and today let's find out how our gas giants

 and ice giants got their pretty rings

 planetary ring systems are complicated and they are more common than once believed for ages saturn was thought to be the only planet in our solar system with a ring system but in recent years ring systems have been discovered around jupiter uranus and neptune as well saturn stands out because its rings are more handsome and huger as you know sometimes size does matter the rings that we can see with our eyes extend about 87 000 miles or 140 000 kilometers above the surface of the planet other fainter rings extend outward for millions of kilometers more although the rings look huge and dense they're actually gossamer thin as little as 33 feet or 10 meters at their thinnest points yep no bigger than a two-story house maybe you're wondering why are they there or did any other planets in the solar system accept the concern 4 ever have rings in the past what would they look like astronomers have looked at all the planets in the solar system with rings and then worked backwards to figure out how and when those rings were formed but before we can talk about how they got there we need to dive into our space exploration history with these rings to see when we discovered that they even exist obviously with its huge ring span saturn was the easiest to spot and had its rings discovered ages before the other three planets about 400 years ago an astronomer named galileo was the first one to spot saturn's rings through his telescope in 1610. the rings are made of ice and rocks varying in different shapes and sizes since then astronomers and scientists have been nearly obsessed with planetary rings and yet it took us about three and a half centuries to find out that uranus had rings all this time too the rings around uranus were first officially discovered in 1977 by j.l elliott e dunham and d-mink the trio of astronomers spotted the rings using nasa's infrared telescope installed on transport aircraft first they found five main rings of uranus then another four during the follow-up observations the last four known rings were discovered by the prodigious voyager 2 spacecraft and hubble telescope however interestingly william herschel the german british astronomer who discovered uranus also claimed that he saw one set of rings around the gas giant back in the 18th century but sadly for him neither his own follow-up observations nor the observations of any other astronomers in the two following centuries could confirm the discovery it is quite eerie that most scientists agree that herschel's telescope wasn't powerful enough to spot uranus's rings but it is amazing that the position orientation and appearance of the ring described by herschel is consistent with modern observations of the biggest epsilon ring at the moment we know of 13 mysteriously faint rings around uranus the particles that make up the rings vary in sizes from grains to 20 meter boulders the rings contain very little dust and are thought to be made of ice mixed with some organic material jupiter and neptune were successful in hiding their rings until we got really close to them yes their rings were not discovered from here on earth but we had to get in proverbially touching distance with these planets to see their hidden jewelry jupiter's rings were discovered by voyager 2 about two years after we discovered rings of uranus the same spacecraft then eventually confirmed the long suspicion of neptune having rings a decade later jupiter's rings were later explored in

 more detail by the space mission galileo hubble new horizons and cassini the

 faint rings of jupiter are made of dust there are four distinctive

 rings in the jovian system the

 innermost halo ring the main ring and the two outer gossamer rings neptune's five rings are somewhat similar to the rings of uranus but have a lot more dust in their composition although we're most familiar with saturn the source of the planet's rings has actually been largely a mystery until the last few years astronomers didn't know if the rings are as ancient as the planet itself or relatively new there have been various theories about planetary rings but nobody was sure for a long time how they were formed one of the most popular theories is that the rings formed at the same time as the planet and its major moons in this case if the material is close to the planet the planet's gravitational pull is too strong to coalesce into a moon and the particles that would otherwise form a moon spread out in orbit around the planet as a ring another theory calls for the exact opposite a closed call by a moon or comet resulted in the planet's gravitational tidal force breaking up those bodies the debris of which then becomes a ring system however before we can discern the probability of these theories we need to know how all these rings are to recreate their formation process as without knowing what factors help to their formation we can never accurately predict what happened there was a problem though the icy rocky bodies in saturn's rings look brand new but could their appearance be deceptive when nasa's cassini spacecraft explored these rings it found something peculiar according to cassini's findings the particles in the rings are constantly clumping and breaking up again making the ice look new but cassini also detected gradual accumulation of dust into the ring system at a raid that allows the rings to be billions of years old so that means saturn's rings may have been forged very well at the beginning of the solar system they are primordial according to evidence transmitted by cassini these rings probably are the building blocks of an icy moon which could never get its act together that means the most popular theory pretty much predicted exactly what happened jupiter's rings on the other hand have a different origin story observations from nasa's new horizons spacecraft determine that the rings are made up of particles blasted into space from micrometeorite impacts with jupiter's moons the rings are being constantly replenished but that doesn't mean they were formed very recently in fact scientists think that jupiter's ring system is about the same age as the planet itself but the dust particles in the rings are quite young thanks to the replenishing we described the gossamer rings are called amalthea and thebe by the name of the moons that feed the rings with dust ejected from their surfaces during collisions with the particles from the outside of the system the two innermost rings are fed the same way by the moons in the main ring the rings around uranus and neptune are still a mystery they're made of very dark material like soot with some organic molecules it's possible they're formed and replenished through some kind of interaction between the planet's magnetospheres and their surrounding environment the most probable theory for the formation of rings of uranus predicts that around 600 million years ago a few of the planet's moons collided and smashed into pieces which then reconciled into a ring system after the dust was settled see what we did there neptune's rings are predicted to be as old as uranus and they likely have the same origin story too yep evidentially it is very much impossible that some 600 million years ago the two ice giants of our solar system arranged moon wars together and their rings are the aftermath of this mighty series of battles as fantastic as that may sound we still have to find out a lot more about our most distant neighbors to put a stamp on the moon wars theory and then we will know for sure how every single planetary ring system was formed in our solar system but before we end this article did you know that not only planets but moons and even asteroids can have their own ring systems too saturn's second largest moonria has three concentrations of plasma on both sides of the moon as if there were symmetric rings around the moon we haven't seen the rings directly but one meter wide rings would be the most probable explanation for such observations similarly the asteroid cherry claw was observed by astronomers with a single ring as it passed in front of a background star and if that makes you wonder why earth doesn't have rings well we can at least take solace in the possibility that the earth most likely had one in the past it must have formed when a massive asteroid impacted our planet and effectively vaporized dinosaurs into extinction yeah so it's

 quite possible that a cloud of rock shot up into the orbit formed a temporary ring that would have dinosaurs remnants in it if this ring was formed it would have slowly crashed back down to the earth piece by piece dinosaur skull by dinosaur skull tell us in the comments what you think earth would have been like if we still had a ring system around our planet  you