The mystery about the formation of rings around planets like Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune (also the largest planets in our solar system) seems to have been solved. An international team of scientists has discovered that these rings have a universally similar particle distribution . The study has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Until now, we knew that the rings of Saturn, in particular, are made up of ice particles of different sizes , probably remnants from some distant catastrophic event.
“What is surprising is that the relative abundance of particles of different sizes follows, with high precision, a mathematical law ‘of inverse cubes’ . In other words, the abundance of 2-meter-size particles is 8 times smaller than the abundance of 1-meter particles, while the abundance of 3-meter particles is 27 times smaller, and so on ”, explains Nikolai Brilliantov, study leader.
Just as planetary rings are likely to exist beyond the solar system , this study has finally solved the puzzle of the particle size distribution of planetary rings, which has turned out to be more generic and common than astrophysicists previously thought. now, I extend this key from the planets better known to us like Saturn and Uranus, as well as to large asteroids, like Chariklo and Chiron, which with only a few hundred kilometers in diameter, are also surrounded by rings.
“ We have finally solved the puzzle of particle size distribution . In particular, our study shows that the observed distribution is not peculiar to Saturn’s rings, but rather has a universal character ”, concludes Billiantov.
