Bright and beautiful, Saturn’s rings are some of the most impressive visual spectacles within our Solar System. The way in which they were formed is still the subject of debate, but one of the theories, perhaps the strongest, has been recreated by NASAafter comprehensive research by Durham University in the United Kingdom.
The theory of these British scientists says that two moons of Saturn collided a few hundred million years ago. The impact was so violent that the two natural satellites shattered into pieces, which then scattered into space.
The force of Saturn’s gravity held the remains of the two moons together and formed the rings we see today. However, it would have been the force of gravity of the Sun that caused the impact between the two.
This theory is plausible, since these two moons were relatively small and close to each other. An impact between the two could have been enough to form the rings.
“This scenario naturally leads to ice-rich rings,” said Vincent Eke, associate professor in the Department of Physics/Institute of Computational Cosmology at Durham University and co-author of the paper. “When icy progenitor moons collide with each other, the rock in the cores of the colliding bodies is dispersed less than the ice covering them,” he added.
NASA took the data generated by the research and carried out the impressive simulation work, which it shows in a video on its YouTube channel.
By simulating nearly 200 different versions of the impact, the team found that a wide range of collision scenarios could disperse the right amount of ice at Saturn’s Roche limit, where it could settle into rings.
“So it’s exciting to use large simulations like these to explore in detail how they might have evolved,” said Jacob Kegerreis, a research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California, according to the the official site of the space agency.