Ringlets Of Saturn Have Revealed Secrets

Flabbergasted with thousands of alluring ringlets? Saturn is unique among of the planets. Saturn is the sixth planet away from the Sun and the second largest sphere among the planets in the solar system. It has a gas giant with approximate radius of nine times than Earth's.

Historically, these gas giants have rings and were discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610. The rings are divided into seven groups and classified accordingly by alphabetical of their discovery (Outwards from Saturn; D, C, B, A, F, G, E). These rings are made up of billions of particles that vary in terms of size -- from tiny dust grains to a kind of object as the size of mountains.

However, lots of scientists, researchers and even everyone are curious about their origin. But then on Oct. 6 2016, a team of researchers from Kobe University and Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan presented a new model for the origin of the Saturn's rings that formulated based from their computer simulations, according to Science Direct.

According to the research team, they focused the study by relating it to the period called the "Late Heavy Bombardment." It is believed that it occurred for the last 4 billion years in the solar system. This event happened when the giant planets underwent orbital migration, where many small bodies failed to completely become planets that existed in the orbit beyond Neptune. Resultantly, of gravitational interactions with the gigantic planet, the orbits of these small bodies have turned into unstable state and most of them move in the solar system and collided with planets that had already formed.

Science Daily noted that it is thought that thousands of Pluto-sized objects that are comparably to one fifth of Earth's size from the Kuiper belt have existed in the outer solar system beyond Neptune. The researchers calculated first the probability that these outsized objects passed close enough to the giant planets to be smashed by their tidal force during the Late Heavy Bombardment. Based from the results, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune experienced close interaction with these large celestial objects several times.

Next step done by the research team is using the computer simulations to further investigate the wreckage of the Kuiper belt objects by tidal force. The results of the computer simulations varied depending in the preliminary conditions. However, the research team discovered that various case of fragments consist of 0.1 percent to 10 percent of the initial mass of the passing objects were captured into the orbits around the planet.

In addition, the joint mass of these captured fragments was found to be abundant to expound the mass of the current rings around Saturn and Uranus. Therefore, these planetary rings were formed when enough large objects crossed nearly to the giants and were destroyed.

Furthermore, the research team also conducted another simulation of the captured fragments using supercomputers at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. Based from the result, it was found out that the captured fragments with a preliminary size of several kilometers are expected to undertake high-speed collisions repetitively and slowly turned into small pieces.

The model of the research team of Japan can also further illustrate the compositional dissimilarity between the rings of Saturn and Uranus. Parallel with Saturn, Uranus and Neptune have higher density. This means that objects can cross within close vicinity of the planet, where they experience an extreme tidal force.

Therefore, these results exemplify that the rings of the giant planets are naturally a synthesis of the formation process of the planets in the solar system. This denotes that giant planets found around other stars that have ringlets formed by similar process.