Jupiter, the fifth planet in our solar system and by far the most massive, is a treasure trove of scientific discovery. Last year, a pair of studies found that the the planet’s iconic Great Red Spot it is 40 times deeper than the Mariana Trench, the deepest place on planet Earth. In April authors of an article in the journal Nature Communications studied a double ridge in northwestern Greenland with the same gravity-scale geometry as those found on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, and concluded that the probability of life on Europa is greater than expected. expected.
Now scholars think they have cracked another great mystery of Jupiter: why it lacks the spectacular rings that its celestial neighbor, Saturn, boasts. As a very massive gas giant with a similar composition, the evolution of the two planets is thought to be similar, meaning why one has a prominent ring system and the other doesn’t has always been something of a puzzle. .
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with results that are currently online and soon to be published in the journal Planetary Science, researchers at the University of California-Riverside used models to determine that Jupiter’s huge moons nip the creation of potential rings in the bud.
Using a computer simulation that explained the orbits of each of Jupiter’s four moons, astrophysicist Stephen Kane and graduate student Zhexing Li realized that the gravity of those moons would alter the orbit of any ice that might come from a comet and ultimately prevent its accumulation in such numbers. a way to form rings, as happened with Saturn. Instead, the moons would throw the ice out of the planet’s orbit or push the ice onto a collision course with itself.
This not only explains why Jupiter only has the most insignificant of rings today; suggests that it probably never had large rings.
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There is more at stake here than simply understanding why the Jupiter aesthetic differs from the Saturn aesthetic. As Kane explained in a statement, the rings of a planet contain many clues about the history of that planet. They can help scientists understand what objects might have collided with a planet in the past, or perhaps the type of event that formed them.
“For us astronomers, it’s the blood spatter on the walls of the crime scene. When we look at the rings of the giant planets, it’s evidence that something catastrophic happened to put that material there,” Kane explained.
Scientists say they don’t plan finishing his astronomical research on Jupiter; your next stop is Uranus, which also has measly rings. The researchers speculate that Uranus, which appears to be tilted on its side, may lack rings due to a collision with another celestial body.
Technically, Jupiter has a ring system, it’s incredibly small and faint. In fact, Jupiter’s rings are so small that scientists he didn’t even discover them until 1979, when the Voyager space probe passed by the gas giant. exist three faint ringsall of them made of dust particles emitted by nearby moons: a flattened main ring that is 20 miles thick and 4,000 miles wide, a doughnut-shaped inner ring that is more than 12,000 miles thick, and a so-called “godssamer” ring that is actually made up of three much smaller rings made up of microscopic debris from nearby moons.
NASA itself has expressed its amazement at the faint rings that accompany the most conspicuous giant in our solar system, in particular, at the size of the particles that compose them.
“These grains are so small that a thousand of them together are only a millimeter long.” nasa writes. “That makes them as small as the particles in cigarette smoke.”
On the contrary, saturn’s rings they are famous for their beauty, and some of the particles in those rings are “as big as mountains”. When the Cassini spacecraft finally took a closer look at Saturn’s rings, it found “spokes” larger than the diameter of Earth and possibly made of ice, as well as jets of water from Saturn’s moon Enceladus, which would provide much of the material in the planet’s E ring.
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