Long lost moon created Saturn's rings, Cassini spacecraft data backs up claim
Discovered by Galileo 400 years ago, the rings of Saturn are about the most striking thing astronomers with small telescopes can spot in our solar system.
But even today, experts cannot agree on how or when they formed.
A new study published Thursday in the prestigious journal Science sets out to provide a convincing answer.
Between 100-200 million years ago, an icy moon they named Chrysalis broke up after getting a little too close to the gas giant, they conclude.
While most of it made impact with Saturn, its remaining fragments broke into small icy chunks that form the planet's signature rings.
"It's nice to find a plausible explanation," Jack Wisdom, professor of planetary sciences at MIT and lead author of the new study, told AFP.
Saturn, the sixth planet from the Sun, was formed four and a half billion years ago, at the beginning of the solar system.
But a few decades ago, scientists suggested that Saturn's rings appeared much later: only about 100 million years ago.
The hypothesis was reinforced by observations made by the Cassini probe, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017.
"But because no one could think of a way to make the rings 100 million years ago, some people have been questioning the reasoning that led to that deduction," said Wisdom.
By constructing complex mathematical models, Wisdom and colleagues found an explanation that both justified the timeline, and allowed them to better understand another characteristic of the planet, its tilt.
Saturn has a 26.7 degree tilt. Being a gas giant, it would have been expected that the process of accumulating matter that led to its formation would have prevented tilt.
- Gravitational interactions -
Scientists recently discovered that Titan, the largest of Saturn's 83 moons, is
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