Dwarf Planets May Have Contributed To Saturn’s Rings

The planets Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus have beautiful rings around them, but none more iconic as the first. While they are gorgeous to look at, it seems that there is a darker story behind them: these rings are found to be composed of pieces of dwarf planets like Pluto, that have strayed to close to the giants long ago.

Space.com reported that astronomers think thousands of Pluto-sized bodies once came close to the Kuiper Belt shortly after the formation of the solar system. However, it seems that things changed, and about 4 billion years ago, the four largest planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune migrated, stirring up the Belt and the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Because of this, gravitational jostles sent many objects crashing into the inner solar system, which caused cosmic impacts known as the Late Heavy Bombardment. A team of researchers from Kobe University in Japan calculated that there had been a fair number of scattered Kuiper Belt objects that came zoomed past the planets - and multiple Pluto-sized bodies may have came too close to them that they were torn apart by their powerful gravitational tugs - leading to the formation of the rings.

With the help of computer simulations, scientists were able to investigate whether or not tidal forces actually disrupted the Kuiper belt objects and the long term evolution of the fragments. Astronomy.com reported that they found fragments of several kilometers that are expected to experience high-speed collisions, and shatter into smaller pieces. These collisions are expected to go around the orbits, leading to the ring formations that we all know today.

Taking into consideration the new model, it explains the difference of the ring comparisons regarding the rings of the three planets, with Uranus and Neptune rings having a higher density than Saturn. That being said, the rings of the giant planets are natural results to the process that helped formed our solar system.