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- The Earth is 7,926 miles in diameter. Saturn is nearly 10 times bigger at 74,900 miles diameter. Saturn rings make it 300,000 miles in diameter. It is like a mini-solar system with a disk and 47 moons.
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- The rings are composed of countless thousands of dirty water ice crystals ranging form microns to meters in size. One proposal for the ring’s formation was that icy moons broke up 100 million years ago as a result of a violent collision. A giant comet or asteroid slammed into the moon, breaking it into pieces. Saturn’s enormous gravity smoothed out the pieces into a flattened disk orbiting around the planet. This theory remains needing more confirming evidence.
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- Saturn formed a disk of rings and moons. Our Sun formed a solar system of disk of planets, asteroids, and comets. The age of these objects has been radioactive dated to be 4.6 billion years old.
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- The oldest indigenous rocks found on Earth are dated to be 3.9 billion years old. It is the dating of meteorites that gets us back to 4.6 billion years. Astronomers believe that the Solar System started as a molecular cloud 100 AU in diameter, 100 times the distance between the Sun and the Earth, or 93million miles times 100.
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- The molecular cloud’s gravity collapse may have been started by a shockwave coming from a nearby supernova explosion. Once the collapse started a chain reaction of ever increasing gravitational pull would accelerate the collapse. The collapse would occur unbalanced and the settled material would begin to rotate. Frictional forces near the center would increase temperatures. The gravitational potential energy would be transformed into heat as the density near the core increased.
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- Angular momentum would cause the rotating disk to rotate more rapidly as it collapsed in size. Like a spinning ice skater pulling her arms in. The disk would have pockets of dust and gas that would collide and stick together. Proto-planets would begin to form in the spinning disk.
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- After about 50 million years of collapsing material with enough mass would accumulate at the core to create the pressure and temperature to commence nuclear fusion of Hydrogen into Helium. The rotating disk continued to create planets in a haphazard set of collisions between planets, minor planets, moons and asteroids.
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- The Sun’s nuclear furnace created a radiation of Solar Wind that was powerful enough to blow away the minor dust and debris in the disk. Gas in the disk cooled and condensed. Collisions continued to form planetisimals and more and more stuck together to form planets and moons.
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- The more distant debris formed the ice comets.
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- Gas giant planets accumulated clouds around their dense cores. Extensive sets of moons formed around the giant planets. Jupiter has 63 moons. Uranus has 27 moons, Saturn has its rings and 47 moons.
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- The gravity interactions of the giant gas planets flung many of the planetisimals into the distant Oort Cloud of comets. And, flung numerous debris into the inner Solar System to create heavy bombardment of the rocky planets and moons. In fact, one giant collision with early Earth created our Moon.
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- Saturn’s’ ring and 47 moons can remind me of a miniature solar system. In fact , if Jupiter was just 75 times bigger it would begin nuclear fusion and our Solar System would include two stars. Possible half of the stars in the sky are binary systems of two stars orbiting each other. We would be watching two sunsets at different times and on different horizons. An image from the “ Star Wars” movie comes to mind.
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- Stay tuned, our spacecraft are now reaching Pluto and beyond. There are likely more discoveries waiting in the outskirts of our Solar System.
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