This stunning animation shows why Saturn’s rings are like a “mini solar system”

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If the alien jumping stars had visited our solar system, it is likely that Saturn is the planet they would remember.

The seven giant rings that surround its equator make Saturn the most different planet orbiting the Sun. It may not be obvious in images of the hula-hoop planet, but the pieces of ice and rock that form these rings spin Saturn at a rate almost 70 times faster than that of sound. In addition, each ring moves at its own pace.

“In a way, the ring system is like a mini solar system,” James O’Donoghue, a planetary scientist from the Japanese space agency, JAXA, told Insider.

“Objects close to Saturn orbit faster, otherwise they would fall into it, while distant objects can afford to go slower. This is the same for the planets.”

During his free time, O’Donoghue makes animations about physics and the solar system. Some of their others have shown that there is no “dark side” to the Moon, the true center of the solar system is not the Sun and the Earth has two types of days.

When he put into practice his skills to represent Saturn’s rings, O’Donoghue created an animation (below) that shows how each ring moves through its own movements in a beautiful circular dance.

In the animation, the line labeled “synchronous orbit” is synchronized with the rotation of Saturn itself, so it shows what parts of the rings you would see over time if you were at this point on the planet.

Saturn’s slowest, outermost ring spins at about 16.4 kilometers per second, slower than Saturn’s rotation. The innermost pieces of ice and rock shoot into space at about 23.2 kilometers per second.

Up close, Saturn’s rings are not as chaotic as their speeds might make them look like. According to O’Donoghue, the ice grains from neighboring tracks only move a few inches per minute with each other.

“This speed is like walking one step every 30 minutes, or similar to rush hour traffic,” he said dit on Twitter. “So the collisions aren’t very dramatic.”

Saturn is slowly swallowing its rings

In addition to being incredibly fast, Saturn’s rings are very long and thin. If you deployed them, as O’Donoghue did in the image below, all the planets would fit comfortably in their length.

605e01266746fb0018a73eb8(James O’Donoghue)

But in total, the rings have only a fifth of the mass of our Moon.

“In other words, our Moon could be used to make 5,000 Saturn ring systems,” O’Donoghue told Insider. “This highlights the extremely thin and fragile degree of Saturn’s rings.”

This fragility is a topic of O’Donoghue’s scientific research. Upon studying Saturn’s upper atmosphere, he and his colleagues found that the rings slowly disappear. Thousands of kilograms of ring material rain on the planet every second. At this rate, the rings should not last more than 300 million years in their current “complete” form, he said.

“Saturn’s ring system is not exactly stable, it looks more like a temporary debris field from some ancient moon or comet that came too close and broke, rather than a permanent feature,” O added. ‘Donoghue. “We can be lucky to live in a time when Saturn’s rings have such a huge presence in the solar system.”

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

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