The War Of The Rings Of Saturn - Part 1
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Before the age of interplanetary probes it was common opinion among astronomers (based more on common sense than on observational evidence, which at that time were still very poor) that Saturn's rings originated at the same time as the formation of the planet, so about 4.6 billion years ago.
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The data produced from the interplanetary missions of the eighties and from the successive observations of Hubble overturned this hypothesis, suggesting an age of only one hundred million years. A very controversial estimate, however, and that at a certain point the observational data collected in 2007 by the Cassini probe and some mathematical simulations, seemed to have led back to the original value of 4.6 billion years. Everything solved? The rings were therefore as old as the planet?
No way! With a resounding final twist, the dive into the atmosphere of the planet with which in 2017 Cassini put an end to its mission overturned the judgment in extremis, ruling that the rings had to be young, or rather very young, probably formed when dinosaurs were still running on Earth...
In short ... a war of bitter controversy that lasted for decades, probably not yet over.
Let's try to understand how it really went?
More than 400 years have passed since Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) first saw Saturn's rings in July 1610, and since then many of the questions that have always accompanied the vision of those wonderful structures have had a definitive answer.
To tell the truth the Italian scientist did not see the whole ring, but only two protuberances on the sides of the planet, the maximum that the poor quality of his instrument allowed him to distinguish. In 1655 the dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) was the first to guess and suggest the presence of a ring around the planet; a ring that the Dutch astronomer judged to be solid, and at the same time so thin as to be invisible when the position of Saturn with respect to the Earth was observed by cutting.
This model, even if not accepted by all, held the bench for two centuries, until the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), future father of electromagnetism, demonstrated by mathematical means that it was necessary to abandon the idea of the solid ring (that would have been soon crumbled by the tidal gravitational forces) and opt for a structure composed by several independent bodies orbiting each one on its own around the planet; This theory earned him the prize offered in 1856 by the University of Cambridge for the researcher who could offer the best scientific explanation of the ring structure.
From the recognition of the real nature of the rings we passed to the research of their origin, and a fundamental contribution to the question came from the ideas proposed in 1848 by french astronomer Edouard Roche (1820-1883), who suggested that the rings could have been formed by the disintegration of a satellite too close to the planet.
The idea had some points not entirely clear, but it was based on his famous mathematical formula that for each planet expresses precisely the so-called "Roche Limit". This limit indicates the minimum distance between a satellite and its planet, below which the satellite fragments due to tidal forces, that is for the distortion induced by the difference of gravity force acting on the part of the minor celestial body closer to the greater celestial body, compared to the more distant one. In the case in which the two bodies have the same density, this limit is worth about 2,44 times the ray of the planet. And the fact that this value coincided just with the external edge of the rings appeared as a proof in favor of its hypothesis.
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