Saturn's rings might not be very old, and resulted from a high-speed collision between two icy moons, according to new research.
. As the system became more destabilized, the moon grazed Saturn, the planet’s powerful gravity tore it to pieces, and the debris formed the icy rings while also kicking Saturn out of the resonance. This evidence supports a young age for Saturn’s rings, perhaps only 100 million years old.
The researchers performed simulations with the powerful Distributed Research using the Advanced Computing supercomputing facility at Durham University’s Institute of Computational Cosmology in the UK. It’s dedicated to particle physics, astronomy, and cosmology. The team used the powerful computer to model collisions between precursor moons in the Saturn system.governs a critical part of the relationship between a planet and its moons.
This is a strong point of the study. Icy moons still have rocky cores, and other scenarios can’t explain why there would be almost no rock in Saturn’s rings. The simulations show that only a negligible amount of rock from the collisions finds its way inside the Roche Limit, which matches the icy nature of Saturn’s rings.
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