If extraterrestrial aliens ever visit our solar system, Saturn is probably the planet they would remember.
The seven giant rings that surround its equator make Saturn the clearest planet orbiting the sun. This may not be obvious on images of the hula hoop planet, but the ice and rock pieces that make up the rings surround Saturn at a rate of almost 70 times the speed of sound. What’s more, each ring moves at its own pace.
“In a way, the ring system is like a mini-solar system,” James O’Donoghue, a planetary scientist at the Japanese space agency, JAXA, told Insider.
“Objects near Saturn orbit faster, otherwise they fall in, while objects can afford to go slower. It’s the same for planets.”
In his spare time, O’Donoghue makes animations about physics and the solar system. Some of his others have shown that there is no ‘dark side’ of the moon, the true center of the solar system is not the sun and that the earth has two kinds of day.
Putting his skills to work depicting Saturn’s rings, O’Donoghue created an animation (below) that shows how each ring moves through its own movements in a beautiful, circular dance.
In the animation, the line called “synchronous orbit” is synchronized with the turn of Saturn itself, so it shows what parts of the rings you would see over time if you were standing in that place on the planet.
Countless shards of frozen water ice form Saturn’s rings, ranging from microscopic icy dust to bus-sized icebergs. Each piece has its own orbit: near Saturn it orbits fast, far away it orbits slowly. Important ring segments are A-to-F (marked in order of discovery) pic.twitter.com/h4QjIz3eY8
– Dr. James O’Donoghue (@physicsJ) 14 June 2020
Saturn’s slowest outer ring rotates at about 37,000 km / h (16.4 kilometers per second) – slower than the rotation of Saturn itself. The inner pieces of ice and rock shoot about 52,000 mph (23.2 kilometers per second) through space.
Up close, Saturn’s rings are not as chaotic as they may seem quickly. According to O’Donoghue, ice grains move on neighboring tracks only a few centimeters per minute relative to each other.
“That speed is like walking one step every 30 minutes, or similar to rush hour traffic,” he said. said on Twitter. “Collisions are therefore not very dramatic.”
Saturn slowly swallows its rings
Besides moving incredibly fast, Saturn’s rings are also very long and thin. If you unfold them – as O’Donoghue did in the image below – all the planets fit comfortably within their length.
(James O’Donoghue)
But in total, the rings have only 1/5 000th mass of our moon.
“In other words, our moon can be used to make 5,000 Saturn ring systems,” O’Donoghue told Insider. “It emphasizes how extremely thin and fragile the rings of Saturn are.”
Saturn’s rings are incredibly delicate: they have only a mass three times the mass of Earth’s atmosphere
Saturn’s rings → 15 × 10¹⁸ kg
Earth atmosphere → 5 × 10¹⁸ kg
Formed when the dinosaurs became extinct, they would live only 100 million years longer and Saturn would surround only 5% of its life. pic.twitter.com/ZB1bI1TBH0– Dr. James O’Donoghue (@physicsJ) 15 August 2019
This fragility is a subject of O’Donoghue’s scientific research. Upon studying Saturn’s upper atmosphere, he and his colleagues found that the rings were slowly disappearing. Thousands of kilograms of ring material rain on the planet every second. At such a rate, the rings should not last more than 300 million years in their current “full” form, he said.
Saturn’s rings are an ice rainbow torn in position by gravity. Here is a natural color of 17 megapixels taken by the Cassini spacecraft. The distances listed are from Saturn’s center; the rings here are ~ 5 Earth wide! Credit: NASA / JPL / Space Sci Inst / CICLOPS pic.twitter.com/boGiweQE12
– Dr. James O’Donoghue (@physicsJ) 2 January 2021
“Saturn’s ring system is not exactly stable, and looks more like a temporary waste field of some ancient moon or comet that is too close and breaks apart, rather than a permanent feature,” O’Donoghue added. “We can be happy that we are living in a time when Saturn’s rings have such a large presence in the solar system.”
This article was originally published by Business Insider.
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