Of all the planets in our solar system, the most embodiment of Saturn It is the most imaginative thanks to its enormous rings… However, even today, there is no consensus among experts as to its origin, or even its age.
Researchers who conducted a study, the results of which were published in the prestigious “Science” journal, said Thursday, they have an answer to this difficult question.
About 4 centuries ago
The study also reported in its conclusions that regarding 100 million years ago, an icy moon crashed following it came too close to Saturn, and then the remnants of this celestial body gradually put themselves in orbit around it.
Study lead author Jack Wisdom said: “Galileo discovered Saturn’s rings regarding 4 centuries ago, and they are among the most interesting things that can be observed through a small telescope in the solar system.”
It is also satisfactory to “find a plausible explanation for their formation,” a professor of planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told AFP.
Doubting the “correctness of logic”
form a planet Saturnthe sixth planet from the sun, 4 and a half billion years ago, in the beginnings of the formation of the solar system.
But a few decades ago, scientists reported that the rings of this planet appeared much later: only regarding 100 million years ago.
Saturn (iStock)
This hypothesis was reinforced by observations transmitted by the Cassini probe, which was launched in 1997 and retired in 2017.
However, “since no one has been able to establish a path to prove that these rings formed only 100 million years ago, some have questioned the validity of the logic” under which this dating was made, according to Jack Wisdom.
complex model
Thus, the researcher and his colleagues prepared a complex model that allows not only to explain its relatively recent appearance, but also to understand another property of this planet, which is its curvature.
In fact, Saturn’s axis of rotation is tilted at an angle of 26.7 degrees to the vertical (the so-called eccentricity of the planet). However, because Saturn is a gas giant, it would have been expected that the accretion process that led to its formation would have left it in a trajectory perpendicular to the plane of its orbit.
recent discovery
Researchers who modeled the interior of the planet for their calculations started from a recent discovery: Titan, the largest of the moons. Saturn (the planet has more than 80 moons), it is gradually moving away from the planet … and relatively quickly.
According to their model, this motion gradually changed the rate at which Saturn’s axis of rotation made a complete rotation regarding the vertical, just as the axis of the game Bulbul forms an imaginary cone as it rotates.
This detail is also important. About a billion years ago, this frequency was in sync with the frequency of Neptune’s orbit. This powerful mechanism caused Saturn to tilt up to 36 degrees.
Saturn (iStock)
gravitational forces
However, the researchers found that this synchronization between Saturn and Neptune is no longer accurate today. Why? This can only happen by a major event. In this sense, they hypothesized the existence of a moon with a chaotic orbit, which gradually became excessively close to Saturn until the contradictory gravitational forces caused it to dislodge it.
Jack Wisdom explains that “it was torn down into many pieces, and these same pieces are still scattered, and little by little the rings are formed”, although most of them descend towards Saturn.
As the influence of Titan diminished, which continued to move away, eventually Saturn’s tilt toward what we see today.
Coming out of the cocoon
Jack Wisdom named the missing moon “chrysalis”, which is a metaphor for the wings of butterflies emerging from a cocoon, as is the case with the formation of rings.
Scientists also believe that “Chrysalis” was slightly smaller than Earth’s moon, and regarding the size of another moon of Saturn, Iapetus. However, the latter consists almost entirely of ice water.
“It is therefore reasonable to assume that the cocoon is also made of ice water, and this leads to the formation of rings,” which are 99% of them, says Wisdom.
When asked whether he considers this study to have solved the mystery of Saturn’s rings, he answers: “We have made a good contribution,” but the system of Saturn and its moons still hides “a lot of mysteries.”
