For years, scientists have wondered why Jupiter doesn’t have thick, bright rings like neighboring Saturn, and now they think they may know why.
Though Jupiter has faint, hazy rings, as seen in recent images from the James Webb Space Telescope — are not as prominent as those of Saturn or Uranus. In fact, they are so flimsy that they cannot be seen with standard astronomical equipment. But now, using sophisticated computer simulation, a team of scientists has discovered a possible explanation for why Jupiter’s rings aren’t as prominent as those of its neighbors: Jupiter’s moons may have prevented ice from settling around Jupiter. huge planet.
“It has long bothered me why Jupiter doesn’t have even more amazing rings that would put Saturn’s to shame,” Stephen Kane, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Riverside, who led the research, said in a statement. “If Jupiter had them, they would seem even brighter to us, because the planet is much closer than Saturn.
Photos: Saturn’s glorious rings up close
“We didn’t know these short-lived rings existed until voyager spaceship passed, because we couldn’t see them,” he added.
Kane wanted to find out why Jupiter’s rings are so faint and whether the gas giant once had thicker rings and somehow lost them. To investigate these questions, he and his colleagues created a dynamical simulation that could take into account the orbit of Jupiter, as well as the orbits of the planet’s four main Galilean moons:Ganymede, callisto, me Y Europe.
saturn’s rings they are mostly made up of ice, some of which was delivered to the planet by comets, which are also mostly made up of ice. If the moons orbiting a planet are massive enough, their gravity can cause ice to be ejected from orbit around that planet. These massive moons can also change the orbit of the ice enough to cause this material to crash into them.
“We found that Jupiter’s Galilean moons, one of which is the largest moon in our Solar system [Ganymede]it would very quickly destroy any large rings that might form,” Kane said. “Massive planets form massive moons, which prevents them from having substantial rings.”
The researchers’ simulation has also led them to think that it is unlikely that Jupiter had large rings at any point in its history.
The ring systems around the planets aren’t just beautiful; They can also be a useful way for astronomers to study a planet’s history and any collisions with moons or comets it may have experienced. This is because the composition of the rings’ material and their shape and size give clues to the events that created them.
The researchers now intend to use their simulations to study the ring system of Uranus. This research may reveal how long Uranus’s rings will last and why it orbits the sun differently than the other planets in the solar system: The ice giant orbits the sun it tilted on its side, and astronomers believe that this unusual tilt is the result of a collision with another body. Uranus’ ring system could be the remains of this impact.
“For us astronomers, it’s the blood spatter on the walls at the crime scene,” Kane said. “When we look at the rings of the giant planets, it’s evidence that something catastrophic happened to put that material there.”
The team’s findings have been accepted for publication in The Planetary Science Journal, and a preliminary version is available via the arXiv database.
Follow us on Twitter @Spacepointcom or in Facebook.