Saturn Might Have Torn a Moon Apart to Make its Rings - by spacewriter
. For reference, that means they could have formed before the first hominids appeared or as far back as the time of the dinosaurs. That makes them quite young in solar system history. But, what happened to create them?
A 2007 artist impression of the aggregates of icy particles that form the ‘solid’ portions of Saturn’s rings. They could be what’s left of a moon called Chrysalis. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of ColoradoThe idea of a moon affecting Saturn’s tilt and breaking apart to form rings requires some pretty complex computer modeling. One piece of information the model needs is the so-called “moment of inertia”. It’s a characteristic that explains how a planet’s mass is distributed in the interior.
From that data, the team modeled the interior of Saturn and identified a distribution of mass that matched the gravitational field that Cassini observed. What they found told them that Saturn is currently close to, but just outside the resonance with Neptune. The planets may have once been in sync hundreds of millions of years ago, but they aren’t anymore. Something happened to change that.