On a clear night, with a decent amateur telescope, Saturn and its series of remarkable rings can be seen from Earth’s surface. But how did those rings come to
be? And what can they tell us about Saturn and its moons, one of the potential locations NASA hopes to search for life? A new series of supercomputer simulations has offered an answer to the mystery of the rings’ origins – one that involves a massive collision, back when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.by NASA and its partners, Saturn’s rings could have evolved from the debris of two icy moons that collided and shattered a few hundred million years ago.
To learn more, the research team turned to the Durham University location of the Distributed Research using Advanced Computing supercomputing facility in the United Kingdom. They modeled what different collisions between precursor moons might have looked like. These simulations were conducted at a resolution more than 100 times higher than previous such studies, using the open-source simulation code, SWIFT, and giving scientists their best insights into the Saturn system’s history.
By simulating almost 200 different versions of the impact, the team discovered that a wide range of collision scenarios could scatter the right amount of ice into Saturn’s Roche limit, where it could settle into rings. “This scenario naturally leads to ice-rich rings,” said Vincent Eke, Associate Professor in the Department of Physics/Institute for Computational Cosmology, at Durham University and a co-author on the paper. “When the icy progenitor moons smash into one another, the rock in the cores of the colliding bodies is dispersed less widely than the overlying ice.”
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