Why does Saturn have rings?

Why does Saturn have rings?

Saturn is viewed as a more beautiful planet to look at than the other planets. The reason for this is that it has colored rings surrounding it. Colored ringed Saturn photos were captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Though we cannot visualize any rings around other planets, astrologers believe that rings are also present around Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus. However, they are probably not seen distinctly due to their black color, or due to their small size.

Saturn is a big planet, and is about 95 times bigger than Earth. It is found that it has 31 moons surrounding it. It is believed by the scientists that these moons are responsible for the dust rings that are created around the planet.

The rings surrounding Saturn are found to be made of ice, rocks and dust particles. It is evident from some of the studies conducted on Saturn, that when asteroids and other celestial objects collide with the moons of this planet, they burst into many pieces. Due to gravity of Saturn, these broken objects remain in the orbit surrounding the planet, with the same velocity.

Then there is a question that can arise for everyone. Why does Earth not have rings around it that can pull objects by gravity? The distance of the 13 moons of Saturn is much less from the planet compared to that of the distance between the Earth and its moon. That could be one of the reasons why Earth does not have rings.

There is another thing called Roche radius. If any object is orbiting a planet within the limit of Roche radius, it will get crushed into small particles by the forces of the moon, due to Earth’s gravitation. These bits will not unite again, and may hit the planet sometime later. So, any celestial object might have been attracted by Saturn’s gravity into the orbit. Since it was in Roche’s radius, it was crushed, and the particles were separated, forming rings. These particles will never unite due to Roche’s limit.