/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15782546
>(Pic) Rhea in front of Saturn and its rings
> Scientists believe that the extremely small effects of the Sun’s gravity on the moons could have added up to slightly destabilize their orbits around Saturn, leading to a collision. When moons are in the right orbital configuration around their planets, the extra gravitational pull exerted on the planet and its moons by the Sun can have a snowballing effect. This effect is called a resonance, and it can lead to the elongation and tilting of the moons’ orbits. In the case of Saturn’s two former moons, a resonance led to their orbits being changed to where their paths crossed, which led to the collision that formed Saturn’s rings and moons.
> One of Saturn’s present-day moons, named Rhea, orbits just beyond the point at which a moon could encounter this resonance. Given that Saturn’s moons, like Earth’s moon, slightly move farther and farther from Saturn in every orbit they complete, Rhea had to have crossed the resonance recently. However, the moon’s orbit is still extremely flat and circular, which suggests that Rhea wasn’t subjected to the effects of the resonance and had to have formed more recently, astronomically speaking.

>>1798138