The DOI matches its Crossref record; 32 of the 32 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Origin of Saturn's Rings and Inner Moons by Mass Removal from a Lost Titan-Sized Satellite
Abstract
The origin of Saturn's rings has not been adequately explained. The current rings are more than 90 to 95 per cent water ice, which implies that initially they were almost pure ice because they are continually polluted by rocky meteoroids. In contrast, a half-rock, half-ice mixture (similar to the composition of many of the satellites in the outer Solar System) would generally be expected. Previous ring origin theories invoke the collisional disruption of a small moon, or the tidal disruption of a comet during a close passage by Saturn. These models are improbable and/or struggle to account for basic properties of the rings, including their icy composition. Saturn has only one large satellite, Titan, whereas Jupiter has four large satellites; additional large satellites probably existed originally but were lost as they spiralled into Saturn. Here I report numerical simulations of the tidal removal of mass from a differentiated, Titan-sized satellite as it migrates inward towards Saturn. Planetary tidal forces preferentially strip material from the satellite's outer icy layers, while its rocky core remains intact and is lost to collision with the planet. The result is a pure ice ring much more massive than Saturn's current rings. As the ring evolves, its mass decreases and icy moons are spawned from its outer edge with estimated masses consistent with Saturn's ice-rich moons interior to and including Tethys.
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“Thus, a retrograde ring could represent the tidal disruption of a captured smaller planet in the system (Canup 2010;Hyodo et al., 2017), which then fills a significant portion of J1407b's Hill sphere.”
From A Self-Gravitating Exoring Around J1407b and Implications for In-Situ Exomoon Formation (2022) · cites this paper as Canup 2010
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Metadata
- Authors
- Canup, R. M.
- Affiliations
- Southwest Research Institute (US)
- Corresponding author
- Canup, Robin M.
- ORCID
- Canup, Robin M.
- Venue
- Nature
- Published
- 2010-12
- Volume
- 468
- Issue
- 7326
- Pages
- 943-946
- ISSN
- 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
- 1476-4687
- OpenAlex
- W2049243255
- Cited by
- 166
- References
- 32
- Citations by year
- 2026: 12 · 2025: 10 · 2024: 12 · 2023: 14 · 2022: 9 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 14 · 2019: 13 · 2018: 14 · 2017: 7 · 2016: 9 · 2015: 11 · 2014: 7 · 2013: 10 · 2012: 8
- FWCI
- 4.90
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Licence
- www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
- Locations
- Nature (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Earth and Planetary Sciences › Space and Planetary Science › Astro and Planetary Science
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Aerospace Engineering › Space Satellite Systems and Control
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Astronomy and Astrophysics › Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies
- Keywords
- rings, ring origin, Titan, tidal disruption, mass removal, icy satellites, numerical simulation
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