2023-10-30 12:00:07
Most scientists believe that Saturn didn’t always have its rings, but that millions of years ago it had a moon orbiting it.
This moon ended up getting very close to the planet, while rotating faster and faster. This acceleration was so violent that it caused the moon to explode. It broke into pieces which then spread around the planet (A planet is a celestial body orbiting around the Sun or of another star of…) taking the shape of a disk (The word disk is used, both in geometry and in everyday life, to designate a…). These fragments are mainly ice (Ice is water in a solid state.) and rock (Rock, from the popular Latin rocca, designates any material constituting the bark…).
Crédit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Matt Tiscareno (SETI Institute), Matt Hedman (University of Idaho), Maryame El Moutamid (Cornell University), Mark Showalter (SETI Institute), Leigh Fletcher (University of Leicester), Heidi Hammel (AURA), J. DePasquale (STScI)
The pieces continued to smash against each other, producing a lot of dust and snow. Some pieces fell on Saturn or floated in space. This is still the case today and, in the distant future, the rings should disappear completely (completely or completely automatic, or even by Anglicism completion or…).
Discovering the rings of Saturn
It was not always known that Saturn had rings. A few hundred years ago, an astronomer (An astronomer is a scientist specializing in the study of astronomy.) named Galileo (Galileo Galilei or Galileo Galilei (born in Pisa on February 15, 1564 and died in Arcetri near Florence ,…) observed the sky through one of the first telescopes. When he used it to Observing Saturn, he found the planet looked a bit like the head of a teddy bear with two large ears. He thought it was perhaps made up of three planets.
Here is a close-up photo of Saturn’s rings.
JPL/NASA
Years later, astronomers used better telescopes and realized that Saturn was surrounded by what looked like a large, flat disk.
Initially, astronomers thought the disk was hitting Saturn. An astronomer named Christiaan Huygens thought that the disk around Saturn was a solid object, like a ring around a finger. Another astronomer, Giovanni Cassini, was the first to notice that the ring was not full, and that there were emptiness between the pieces.
Today we know that the rings are made of moon dust and rocks. And since Saturn is very far from the Sun, it is a very cold planet. This means that the rocks in Saturn’s rings are very icy. Some are even made entirely of ice, like snowballs. Saturn’s rings are very bright because the ice strongly reflects light from the sun.
By sending space probes to other planets and taking photos up close, it was discovered that Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune also had rings. But these rings are thinner and difficult to see from Earth. It was also realized that these planets had many moons, some smaller and some larger than Earth’s Moon.
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