Ricardo Hueso Alonso
Researcher at the Department of Applied Physics I and the Planetary Sciences Group of the Bilbao School of Engineering of the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU
Ever since Galileo Galilei's first observation of Saturn with a telescope more than 400 years ago, the rings have been mysterious. Galileo could not identify what they were and, decades later, the astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini identified gaps in them. James Clerk Maxwell, famous for his laws of electromagnetism, devoted his early years of research to determining the nature of the rings, concluding that they were made up of a myriad of small bodies whirling around Saturn at speeds determined by the gravity of the immense planet, 95 times more massive than the Earth.
The Cassini spacecraft (NASA) explored the Saturn system between 2004 and 2017, determining that the rings had the equivalent mass of one of Saturn's numerous icy satellites, a chemical composition of water ice, and an apparent age of only about 100 million years old. In a solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago, this is a very young age. But what is the origin of the rings and why are they so young? Could they be the remains of a satellite of Saturn broken up by the planet's tidal forces? Although this is a common proposal for the origin of the rings, it has traditionally presented difficulties in explaining the young age of the rings.
Another mystery of Saturn is its axis of rotation, which is tilted 27° with respect to the axis perpendicular to the ecliptic, which is the average plane in which the planets orbit. This inclination is similar to that of the Earth's axis of rotation, which is tilted by 23°. For a planet as large as Saturn, it is very difficult to explain this large tilt. However, the largest of Saturn's satellites, the large moon Titan, has an orbit that moves away from the planet due to tidal braking and this motion may contribute to the tilt of the planet's rotation axis. In the present solar system, Saturn's axis of rotation also undergoes a slow spin like the axis of a spinning top, which does not remain fixed but, in the case of Saturn, rotates in a direction perpendicular to the ecliptic. This movement is called precession and has a parallel on Earth, where the precession of the axis of rotation occurs with a period of 25,800 years. On Saturn the precession of the rotation axis has a period of 1.7 million years and that figure is surprisingly close to the precession of Neptune's orbit. Are these phenomena related? In their paper in Science, Jack Williams of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and colleagues say so.
In a cosmic billiards manoeuvre, Jack Williams and his team investigate whether Saturn's tilted axis was caused by a combination of Titan's outward migration and gravitational interaction with Neptune in an orbital resonance that no longer exists today. To explain that Saturn is no longer synchronised with Neptune they propose that Saturn has lost one of its satellites, which may have migrated by tidal effects towards the planet and was broken up by Saturn's tides, forming the rings. The proposed name for this lost object is Chrysalis (Chrysalis) and represents the change of this world after it was transformed into Saturn's beautiful rings. The age of the rings correctly verifies the current small decoupling between Neptune's orbital resonance and the precession of Saturn's rotation axis. This theory is an elegant statement of the complex effects of gravity on planetary systems and shows that the solar system is a rich and varied place subject to permanent change.