The Reality of Saturn’s Rings

Akshaj Vyas

Has anyone seen Brian Cox’s Wonders of the Solar System? If so, then have you seen an episode discussing Saturn’s Rings and how they formed?
In this article I will be talking about Saturn’s rings, a basic history, and the wonders that lie in it.

A brief history of Saturn’s Rings

Saturn has been around in the skies since the Solar System was born 4.6 billion years ago. It has intrigued many peoples for millennia, since humanity took its first strides on planet earth. 

But its moons and its most intriguing features, it’s rings, weren’t discovered in 1610, by Galileo Galilei, the great Italian astronomer. He thought those blobs next to Saturn were moons nestling at its side, but in a few decades’ time, when Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens examined the planet again with a telescope that magnified it 50 times. The astronomer then found a thin disc, a clear piece of evidence conveying the fact that Saturn had rings. Huygens noticed that the disc disappeared over a sequence of 15 years – Galileo noticed this as well and thought the planet had eaten its children. Later research by the Cassini-Huygens mission showed, as the planet tilted, it disappeared from view since we saw it edge-on. Gravity, as we see it, has pulled the rings into an incredibly thin and flat plane no more than 10 km thick. 

About

Saturn’s rings have pieces of rock ice and dust that range from microscopic crystals of ice and dust to house-size boulders. Scientists have discovered a multitude of gaps between the rings, such as the Cassini and Encke gaps, to create 7 distinguishable rings- the A to G rings.

Cassini also discovered various other moons of Saturn too.

However, there was another astronomer that discovered the true neighbour-wonder of Saturn: Sir Frederick William Herschel, in 1789. This moon was the icy world of Enceladus, which was named after a giant in Greek mythology. There is one thing that is really wondrous about it, and that conveys that it’s no ordinary moon – it contains the elixir for life: water!

Any scientist would be enthralled by this, because it is so distant from the sun that any water would be frozen solid. Instead, liquid water erupted from geysers tens of times higher than those found on Earth. The reason for this may be observed on Io, where a gravitational tug-of-war between Ganymede and Jupiter has virtually ripped its surface apart. The friction created by movement beneath the surface heated up the core, causing it to erupt. The similar thing happens on Enceladus, resulting in spectacular geyser displays.

This is the reason for the D-ring forming: it is made up of tiny microscopic chunks of ice from Enceladus, a Solar System wonder.

Titan

Titan was discovered by Christiaan Huygens – the great Dutch astronomer – on March 25th 1655. It was almost 300 years later when Gerard Kuiper saw it had an atmosphere – a potential life-giver. A mission from NASA, launched in 1997, came to a fitting climax where it honoured the two great scientists for their discoveries and their contributions to what we know about Saturn today. The probe reached Saturn in 2004, after using a series of orbital transits using a technique to minimise fuel called a ‘Hohmann transfer’. This is used to minimise fuel usage during a mission. After a month after Cassini started orbiting Saturn, it dropped a tiny probe called Huygens, used to investigate the surface of the Wonder Titan.

Titan turned out to be a really familiar world because from all aspects of vision from the spacecraft since it contained not only an atmosphere, it contained valleys, hills and mountains, and everything that we’d experience on Earth. This was so familiar…because it was familiar. There were smoothly sculpted rocks that were rounded, as though there was a presence of water or another liquid on there. Any water would be rock-solid, so it was eliminated as an explanation. When Cassini looked in 2006, they found out it RAINED liquid methane, and there was a methane-cycle, not a water cycle.

These are just a few Wonders lying around Saturn, and many more are yet to be discovered, and whose reasons are yet to be found, e.g., Iapetus’ black patches, whose patches cover almost half its surface area. Why did they form? And what are they? There are lot more discoveries to be made about the plethora of wonders within Saturn’s rings. Such discoveries can revolutionize our understanding of Saturn as we know it.