New study explains source of Saturn’s rings
DEC 13, 2010
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.024901
Science News : Saturn’s majestic rings are the remnants of a long-vanished moon that was stripped of its icy outer layer before its rocky heart plunged into the planet, a new theory proposes. The icy fragments would have encircled the solar system’s second largest planet as rings and eventually spalled off small moons of their own that are still there today, argues Robin Canup, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. The theory, which was published online 12 December in Nature, will be put to the test in 2017, when NASA’s Cassini spacecraft finishes its grand tour of Saturn by making the best measurements yet of the mass of the rings, writes Alexandra Witze for Science News. Researchers can use those and other details to better tease out how the rings evolved over time.
© 2010 American Institute of Physics
