When I mention the planet Saturn, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Many of you will say rings and that would be correct.
Saturn is a sight to behold in any telescope. The first time you see the rings with your own eyes it is an amazing experience. Christian Huygens experienced the same feeling when he turned his telescope to Saturn in 1655 and saw the rings for the first time with his own eyes. Galileo saw them in 1610 as well but could not make them out as rings. This became a serious matter and was so serious in fact that when scientists communicated in Latin with each other, they did so while using secret coded anagrams. This was tipping the known body of knowledge upside down. It was also directly colliding with the popular religious beliefs of the day, and the wrong thing could end your life.
It wasn’t until 1977 that we discovered yet another planet surrounded by rings. This time it was Uranus. The rings were not visible, but because there was an occultation of a star by the planet Uranus, NASA flew a mission with the Kuiper Airborne Observatory and during the mission, scientists noticed dips in the light from the star prior to the actual occultation taking place. As these dips took place, scientists initially though that it might be clouds, but there were none. In fact, after the star’s light was obstructed, the normal dip occurred and after reappearance, the same set of dips in the light took place. The result appeared to have a pattern that there were indeed rings around the planet Uranus. Voyager 2 later confirmed this in 1986.
In 1979, Voyager 1 discovered a faint ring around Jupiter as well. Now there were 3 known planets with rings, all gas giants. Speculation abounded that we might be in for a surprise at Neptune, and in 1989, Voyager 2 confirmed there were indeed rings around Neptune.
Within our lifetime, things have gotten really interesting, and we have discovered that the rings are the result of gravitational forces tearing apart debris and scattering it and distributing it in an orbital plane around the planet. This is the result of debris being too close where the gravitational forces of the planet trying to tear it apart exceeds the gravitational forces of the debris trying to keep it together. There is a logical mechanism.
The distance where this destruction takes place is called the Roche limit. Anything that comes to this gravitationally defined line near the planet is subject to destruction and scattering. In fact if our own moon were 20 times closer, or about 12,000 miles out, it would be at the Earths Roche limit and would be at the destruction point for the seeds for ring formation.
I am going to make a hypothesis at this point then that the universe is filled with ringed planets, including more gas giants like the 4 in our solar system and with supermassive ring systems and so much more. To me, the odds of this happening are greater than the odds of this being unique at this point.
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