PARIS – An enigmatic ring of icy particles circling Saturn, herded into a narrow ribbon by two tiny moons, was probably born of a cosmic collision, according to a study published on Monday.
The so-called F ring, some 140,000 kilometers beyond the sixth planet from the sun, orbits at the border between Saturn’s other rings and several moons.
Farther toward Saturn, millions of ice blocks populating the planet’s haunting halos are prevented from cohering into moons by its powerful tidal forces.
Further out are Saturn’s main moons, distant enough to have cohered into spheres with their own gravity: Mimas, Enceladus and Titan, which is the only moon in our solar system with a substantial atmosphere.
And in the boundary zone F ring’s icy particles whirl around the planet in a band barely 100 kilometers across, itself orbited by moons Prometheus and Pandora.
Scientists have long known that these so-called shepherd moons were partly responsible for keeping the F ring in tight formation.
What they did not know was how this unusual configuration came into being.
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