Origin of Saturn’s rings and inner moons by mass removal from a lost Titan-sized satellite

Robin M. Canup ()
Additional contact information
Robin M. Canup: Planetary Science Directorate, Southwest Research Institute, 1050 Walnut Street, Suite 300, Boulder, Colorado 80302, USA

Nature, 2010, vol. 468, issue 7326, 943-946

Abstract: The formation of Saturn's watery rings Previous theories developed to explain the origins of Saturn's rings — based on collisional disruption of a small moon or tidal disruption of a passing comet — have failed to account for the basic properties of the rings, including their icy composition. Robin Canup proposes a new model in which the rings were formed by the action of planetary tidal forces on a large moon as it migrated inwards, stripping away its icy outer layer and leaving a rocky core that was eventually lost to collision with the planet. The result would be a massive ring made of pure ice, which has since evolved through collisions with meteoroids to produce the rings we see today, which are 90–95% water ice.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09661 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:468:y:2010:i:7326:d:10.1038_nature09661

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature09661

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().