![]() Saturn’s main rings, as well as those around the other giant planets, lie inside the planets’ Roche limits. With the ring’s discovery, the Roche limit may need a rethink.Īlthough the limit is somewhat of an approximation, it has served as a good rule of thumb in the solar system. Only outside that limit can small objects, dust, and debris coalesce under their own gravity to form a moon. Inside that region, the stronger gravitational force of the planet overpowers the moon’s gravity and that tidal pull eventually tears the moon apart. ![]() “That is not where it was supposed to be,” says Bruno Morgado (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), lead author of a team of 59 astronomers who report the discovery in Nature.įrench astronomer Edouard Roche defined the concept of the Roche limit in 1848, calculating where a planet's tidal forces would exceed the gravitational force holding a moon together. The distant dwarf planet 50000 Quaoar appears to have a ring that spans far beyond where it ought to be stable. (Note that observations show only pieces of this ring, and those pieces vary in width, like a bumpy thread.) Quaoar’s moon Weywot is shown on the left and the distant Sun on the right. An artist’s impression shows a ring around the dwarf planet Quaoar.
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