2023-09-27 17:03:23
MADRID, 27 Sep. (EUROPA PRESS) –
Saturn’s rings could have evolved from the remains of two parent icy moons that collided and broke apart only a few hundred million years ago.
It is the conclusion obtained from new supercomputer simulations, developed by researchers from NASA and the universities of Durham and Glasgow, that involve as protagonists two ancient moons similar to the current ones Dione and Rhea.
Debris that didn’t end up in the rings could also have contributed to the formation of some of Saturn’s current moons.
Most of the high-quality contemporary measurements of Saturn come from the Cassini spacecraft. It spent 13 years studying the planet and its systems after entering Saturn’s orbit in 2004.
The Cassini spacecraft captured precise data as it passed and even dive into the space between Saturn’s rings and the planet itself.
Cassini discovered that the rings are almost pure ice and have accumulated very little dust contamination since their formation, suggesting that they formed during the last percentage of the solar system’s life.
Motivated by the rings’ remarkable youth, the research team turned to the COSMA machine housed at Durham University as part of the UK’s DiRAC (Distributed Research Using Advanced Computing) facility.
The team modeled what different collisions between precursor moons might have looked like.
These hydrodynamic simulations were performed using the open source SWIFT software at more than 100 times the resolution of previous studies, giving scientists their best insights into the history of the Saturn system.
Dr Vincent Eke, Associate Professor in the Department of Physics/Institute of Computational Cosmology at Durham University, said: “We test a hypothesis about the recent formation of Saturn’s rings and we discovered that the impact of icy moons is capable of sending enough material close to Saturn to form the rings we see now.
“This scenario naturally leads to ice-rich rings because when the parent moons collide with each other, the rock in the cores of the colliding bodies is dispersed less than the ice covering them.”
Saturn’s rings today live close to the planet, within what is known as the Roche limit: the farthest orbit where a planet’s gravitational force is powerful enough to disintegrate larger bodies of rock or ice that approach. further. Material orbiting further away could clump together to form moons.
By simulating nearly 200 different versions of the impact, the research team found that a wide range of collision scenarios could disperse the right amount of ice at Saturn’s Roche limit, where it could sit in rings as icy as Saturn’s today.
Since other elements of the system have a mixed composition of ice and rock, alternative explanations have failed to explain why there would be almost no rock in Saturn’s rings.
Dr. Jacob Kegerreis, a graduate of Durham University and now a research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California, said: “There are many things we still don’t know about the Saturn system, including its moons that harbor environments that could be suitable for life, so It’s exciting to use large simulations like these to explore in detail how they might have evolved“.
Dr Luis Teodoro, from the Faculty of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Glasgow, said it’s a statement: “The apparent geological youth of Saturn’s rings has been an enigma since the Voyager probes sent their first images of the planet. This collaboration has allowed us to examine the possible circumstances of their creation, with fascinating results.”
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