Saturn’s rings the remnants of a moon that strayed too close, say scientists

Scientists theorize that the rings are the aftermath of a moon that was ripped apart by the planet.

According to the data from the final stage of the mission, the planet may have been ringless for most of its 4.5 billion-year lifespan. The gas giant was torn apart by an inner moon that was too close to it.

The name of the lost moon has been called chrysalis.

Jack Wisdom, a professor of planetary science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the lead author of the study.

The findings are "remarkable" because they have the potential to resolve several separate puzzles aboutSaturn with one bold but plausible hypothesis.

Wisdom's team wanted to explain why Saturn is tilted. The models suggested that the tilt was due to the fact that the planets were trapped in a resonance with one another. These models are sensitive to small changes in variables.

The original explanation fell apart as the mission filled in details of everything from the inner composition of Saturn to the dynamics of the planet's 83 moons. According to these new details, at some point in the past, Neptune lost control ofSaturn.

Scientists searched for possible disruptive events that could have caused this. There was a neat fit for the data from the lost moon scenario. Wisdom said they were going to try to explain the tilt of the planet. We had to get rid of the satellite again after proposing an extra one.

The simulations were run to figure out the properties of the moon. It was suggested that, between 100m and 200m years ago, there were a number of close encounters with the moons Iapetus and Titan. This dramatic encounter ripped the moon into fragments and left a ring of debris in its wake.

The tilt of the moon and its rings is explained by the loss of Chrysalis. It would be in line with the chemical properties of the rings, which date them to about 100m years old, but which some had dismissed because it was not certain how the rings would have materialised so late in the planet's history. Wisdom thinks we provide a convincing argument.

Explaining several puzzles with one hypothesis is a good return on investment.

Most of the ice in the rings is water, while the rest is rock and metal.

The findings are in a journal.