Reacción a "Reactions to study suggesting Saturn's rings and tilt may be the product of a missing moon"

Saturn's rings were discovered by Galileo, who described them as "ears", and as we have learned more about them, the more puzzling it is to explain their origin. In general, such structures often form as a result of the formation processes of the larger bodies around which they orbit. The rings are formed by debris, smaller rocks that are released in collapse processes or are generated later in collisions and survive as part of the system in the form of discs.  

In the case of Saturn's, all determinations indicate that they are young (about 100 million years old) which is difficult to explain, just as it is difficult to understand why the planet has such an inclination angle or the origin of the eccentricity - how far the orbit is from being circular - of the moon Titan. The authors suggest a mechanism that can explain all the phenomena at once: the age of the rings, Titan's orbit and the planet's tilt angle. They do this on the basis of computer simulations, which is the only way we have to determine how several bodies move at the same time under their mutual influence.  

These simulations include a more precise measurement of Saturn's outer gravitational field, determined with the Cassini spacecraft, which allows us to better fit models of the planet's interior structure and to narrow down the possibilities for the evolution of the system, discarding models that had previously been proposed to explain the formation of the rings as part of the gravitational influence exerted by Neptune. The proposal is simple: the destruction of a moon, and it explains the age of the rings, Titan's orbit and the planet's tilt angle all at once.