Name: How a Walnut-Shaped Moon Help Shape Saturn’s Rings
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Shaped by gravitational forces over millions of years, Saturn's rings are incredibly complex. A tiny moon named Pan, just 17 miles wide, has notably influenced their structure by creating the Encke Gap.

For millions of years, a tiny moon has made a significant impact on the structure of Saturn’s rings.

How a Walnut-Shaped Moon Help Shape Saturn’s Rings

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Shaped by gravitational forces over millions of years, Saturn's rings are incredibly complex. A tiny moon named Pan, just 17 miles wide, has notably influenced their structure by creating the Encke Gap.

For millions of years, a tiny moon has made a significant impact on the structure of Saturn’s rings.

Space & Flight

How a Walnut-Shaped Moon Help Shape Saturn’s RingsPublished: November 5, 2024Speaker 1: Saturn's rings are amazingly complex.Speaker 2: And the more we zoom into them, the more complex they seem to be.Speaker 3: It is one of the wonders of the solar system.Speaker 4: Scientists think the rings may have first formed when a moon strayed too close to Saturn was pulled apart by its gravity, creating a jumble of trillions of individual fragments of rock and ice. So what turns such chaos into the ordered beauty we see today? NASA's Cassini spacecraft gave us the best view of the rings we've ever had.Speaker 5: The photographs from Cassini gave us Saturn's rings at all angles. We saw them reflecting light from the sun, we saw Cassini look through them toward the sun, just the spectacular beauty of them, just mind-blowing.Speaker 4: And lurking among the loops of rock and ice, Cassini imaged one of the most startling moons in the entire Saturn system.Speaker 3: So Pen is this weird tiny object, it is only 17 miles across and it looks for me like a walnut.Speaker 2: And it looks like it has a dusting of material around it that could easily break off if you were to touch it.Speaker 4: Despite its small size, Pen has a big impact on the structure of the rings.Speaker 1: Pen is a great example of how gravitational interactions can shape Saturn's rings and create the gaps that we see.Speaker 4: Pen orbits inside a wide track within Saturn's rings called the Encke Gap.Speaker 3: We think Pan created the Encke Gap by cleaning the orbit and by accumulating all this ring material, dust and ice around it.Speaker 2: This ring material has settled specifically on Pen's equator again and again and again, and that meant there is this large ridge around Pen itself.Speaker 5: It looks like an empanada because so much water and ice from the rings have built up around its equator.Speaker 4: For millions of years, Pen has been nibbling away, clearing particles out of its orbit and creating this pathway, only that can't be the full story.

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How a Walnut-Shaped Moon Help Shape Saturn’s Rings

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Explore More

The Planets: Saturn

Why is Haumea Shaped Like an Egg?

Solar System: Strange Worlds