A study published a few weeks ago indicated that Phobos, the largest moon on Mars, due to the gravitational pull of Mars, was not only bringing the satellite closer to the red planet, but would end up destroying it before 50 million years .
Now, new research delves even more into this future event, arguing that Phobos will end its days splitting and its particles forming a ring around our neighbor the red planet , so that Mars would become part of the planets of our solar system. that like Saturn, they have rings.
According to the study, led by Benjamin Black and Tushar Mittal from the University of Berkeley (California) and the City College of New York (USA) respectively, the event will occur in between 20 and 40 million years and the resulting ring it would have a density very similar to that of Saturn’s rings , the largest and most prominent in our solar system and would last between 1 million and 100 million years.
The moon Phobos is gradually heading towards the red planet rotating like a spiral, unlike the natural satellite of the Earth, which is gradually moving away from us. Thus, using observational data and a geotechnical model to calculate the resistance of the satellite, astronomers confirmed that a large part of Phobos is composed of weak materials and when the pressure exerted by Mars reaches its maximum, these fragile materials will separate forming this particular ring around Mars that at some point could have a mass with a density similar to that of the rings of Saturn.
The work has been published in the journal Nature Geoscience .
