It turns out that Jupiter would have a much larger ring than Saturn without its giant moon.
According to new research, a large satellite of a gas giant destroys a ring before it forms.
“The Galilean moons of Jupiter, one of the largest satellites in our solar system, have been found to destroy large rings that can form very quickly,” said UCR astrophysicist Stephen Kane who led the study.
As a result, it is unlikely that Jupiter had a large ring at any time in the past.
Giant planets like Jupiter – the largest planet in our solar system – form a giant moon, which prevents them from having significant rings.
And because of its size, Jupiter will have a larger and more spectacular ring than Saturn.
To understand why Jupiter looks the way it does now, Kane and his graduate student Zhenxing Li perform dynamic computer simulations to record the orbits of Jupiter’s four major satellites and the orbits and times of the planet itself. You need to form a ring.
The results of this study, soon to be published in the journal Planetary Science, explain why the giant planets don’t have rings.
Saturn’s ring next to Jupiter is mostly ice, some of which may have come from comets that are mostly ice. If the moons are large enough, their gravity can either pull ice out of the planet’s orbit or orbit the ice enough that it collides with the moon.
In fact, all four of the giant planets in our solar system (Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, and Jupiter) have rings. However, the rings of Neptune and Jupiter are so thin that they are difficult to see with conventional starry sky observing instruments.
Coincidentally, some of the newly released images from the James Webb Space Telescope contained images of Jupiter showing a faint ring.
“We didn’t know these temporal rings existed until the Voyager spacecraft flew by, because we couldn’t see them,” Kane said.
Uranus is not as big as Saturn, but it does have a more substantial ring. In the future, Kane will run a simulation of the state of Uranus to see what the ring life of the planet will be like.
Some astronomers believe that Uranus is tilted to one side as a result of the planet’s collision with another celestial body. That ring could be the bane of this effect.
In addition to its beauty, the ring provides astronomers with evidence of possible collisions with satellites and comets in the past, helping astronomers understand the planet’s history. The shape and size of the ring, and the composition of the material, provide clues as to the type of event that created the ring.
“For us astronomers, they are the blood on the walls of the crime scene. When we see the ring of giant planets, it is evidence that something catastrophic happened and put the substance there,” Kane said.
Source: Metro
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