How was Saturns' rings formed, and why is it a spiral?

Question

I've recently discovered and seen in photographs that a few rings around Saturn is actually spiral, which brings me to the big question, how were the rings formed? There are rings that are almost 25 500 km wide but only 1 km thick.

Answer 1

Saturn was born an extremely large baby, with a condition known as 'elephantism'. The result is that every part of his anatomy is substantially bigger than normal, and his ring is no exception. It isn't nice to poke fun at the size of his ring. Spare a thought for his poor mother, who has to clean up everything that comes out of it due to a shortage in galactic-size nappies.

Answer 2

After all this time we're still not sure about the origin of Saturn's rings," says Jeff Cuzzi, a planetary scientist at the NASA Ames Research Centre. Astronomers once thought that Saturn's rings formed when Saturn did: 4.8 billion years ago as the Sun and planets coalesced from a swirling cloud of interstellar gas. "But lately," Cuzzi says, "there's a growing awareness that Saturn's rings can't be so old."

Answer 3

Nobody really 'knows' this answer with 100% certainty.....the most accepted answer is that the rings are surplus material that didn't quite accrete, or glob together, as the planetary mass of Saturn formed, and remained in a low-planetary orbit, unable to escape but having too much vector energy to join the planetary mass.....the slight spiral would derive from the material in the rings that did "land", or escape.....this process probably isn't over yet.....

Answer 4

Saturn`s rings are in fact made up of rocks which are trapped in the planets gravity field. Bit of a givaway this but, they are "rings" and not "spirals" so dont believe everything you see on film. The camera does lie.

Answer 5

Galaxies are available 3 significant instructions outstanding with the help of their visual attraction: spirals, like the Milky way, are formed like pinwheels; irregulars don't have any discernible structure in any respect; and ellipticals are round- or oval-formed gadgets. Spirals and irregulars are frequently web pages of ongoing superstar-formation and for this reason contain youthful stars. Ellipticals, having finished their grant of clean gasoline, can not variety stars any extra and contain usually very previous stars. Spiral galaxies are a composite of stars and gasoline in a disk surrounding a mandatory bulge, it somewhat is amazingly resembling an elliptical galaxy, only smaller. Waves contained in the disk variety the spiral fingers and reason the gasoline to interrupt down and variety new stars. for this reason, the disk is wealthy in youthful stars. Older stars are frequently discovered contained in the bulge. Elliptical galaxies and the bulges of spirals were the challenge of various many years of observational and theoretical paintings. for decades, astronomers idea that the rotation cost of those round superstar structures determined no matter if or not they'd be round or oval formed, with the added without delay rotating ellipticals being the flattest. special analyze of 1000's of ellipticals through the years now advise an totally diverse image. Ellipticals and bulges are supported hostile to their self-gravity, which may lead them to cut back, through the random velocities of the celebs, fairly very resembling the action of molecules in a warm gasoline. The distribution of stellar action determines the superb structure of the galaxy, it somewhat is, no matter if it really is round, oblate, or very flattened.

Answer 6

No doubt they came from a close encounter with the large body which is in a highly elliptical solar orbit and which comes in close every 0.6 to 0.7 million years. I think the rings are temporary. A satellite may have exploded due to the gravity gradient at the time of the encounter.

Answer 7

It is temproary. It is either in the process of forming a moon or getting absorbed by the planet. These are derbies from the space got in to the orbit of saturn.

Answer 8

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn%27s_rings