How Saturn ate up a moon and got its rings

Scientists have found that up to 95 per cent of Saturn’s rings are made up of icy material,posing the obvious question—if they were formed by the remnants of a moon,or several moons,where did all that silicate material go?

Another hiccup in the old theory is that such collisions could not have possibly taken place during the period the rings are calculated to have been formed. Images of Saturn’s rings show luminous orbs that,scientists say,cannot be more than a few hundred million years old. This is because the brightness suggests there has been a lack of contamination by dark meteoritic materials,which takes quite a lot of time.

On the other hand,the Late Heavy Bombardment,the only probable astronomical event that mirrors the theoretical onslaught of comets and asteroids (and the resultant collisions with moons) that may have formed the rings,happened about 3.5 billion years ago,considerably predating the rings’ birth. So what did happen? Professor Ip proposes that a moon or object the size of Titan—Saturn’s largest moon—may have come too close to the giant planet’s ferocious winds and gravitational pull and got swallowed up. In the process,the object was stripped of its icy mantle,and huddled around the planet while the inner core,made up of silicate material like other moons in this freezing region of the solar system,plunged into the gaseous planet.