“We like it because it’s a scenario that explains two or three different things that were previously not thought to be related.”
, a mere 150 million years or so old . If the dinosaurs had telescopes, they might have seen a ringless Saturn. Another mysterious feature of the gas giant is its nearly 27-degree tilt relative to its orbit around the sun. That tilt is too large to have formed when Saturn did or to be the result of collisions knocking the planet over.When Saturn formed, its spin axis was probably close to straight up and down .
Wisdom and colleagues used precision measurements of Saturn’s gravitational field from the Cassini spacecraft, which “We argue that it’s so close, it couldn’t have occurred by chance,” Wisdom says. “That’s where this satellite Chrysalis came in.” Calculations and computer simulations showed that the scenario works, though not all the time. Out of 390 simulated scenarios, only 17 ended with Chrysalis disintegrating to create the rings. Then again, massive, striking rings like Saturn’s are rare, too.
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