Why Some Planets Have Rings

We are able to assume that any ring circling any planet was brought on by comparable means, regardless of the photo voltaic system. There are solely so some ways it may well occur. However even wanting solely at our tiny cosmic yard, we will study lots about planetary rings. One factor to notice: It’s 100% potential for an asteroid to “collide” with a planet like Jupiter, though Jupiter is fabricated from fuel. This occurred as not too long ago as September 13, 2021, when an beginner astronomer in Brazil recorded the incident (by way of House).

Enjoyable reality time: It isn’t the case that there’s just one, huge, flat band per planet. Neptune, as an illustration, has 5 full rings and 4 semi-ringed “arcs,” as NASA explains. We even know the way huge a few of them are and the way distant from the planet. The Leverrier ring, as an illustration, is a skinny 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) huge, and 53,200 kilometers (~33,100 miles) from Neptune’s heart. As for supplies, rings are fabricated from billions of bits of rock and ice, starting from as massive as a home to microscopically small, because the College of Colorado at Boulder states.

Not like a hoop’s symbolically everlasting form, although, planetary rings received’t final without end. Saturn, as an illustration, is shedding its rings little by little. Gravity pulls down their rock and ice at a fee of an “Olympic-sized swimming pool [every] half an hour,” as CNN says. Inside a brief 100 million years, the rings can be gone.