ring systemplanetary

Assorted References

• observations by Voyager ( in Voyager )

  ...planets and their moons. For example, close-up images from the spacecraft charted Jupiter’s complex cloud forms, winds, and storm systems and discovered volcanic activity on its moon Io. Saturn’s rings were found to have enigmatic braids, kinks, and spokes and to be accompanied by myriad “ringlets.” At Uranus Voyager 2 discovered a substantial magnetic field around the planet and...

• research by Cassini ( in Cassini, Gian Domenico )

  ...1671 and 1679 he made observations of the Moon, compiling a large map, which he presented to the Académie. In 1675 he discovered Cassini’s division and expressed the opinion that Saturn’s rings were swarms of tiny moonlets too small to be seen individually, an opinion that has been substantiated. In 1683, after a careful study of the zodiacal light, he concluded that it was of cosmic...

solar system

The satellite and ring systems of the giant planets, particularly those of Jupiter and Saturn, resemble miniature planetary systems. As an analogy, one may say that moons and rings are to the giant planets what the planets and the asteroid belt are to the Sun. The moons of the giant planets can be classified as either regular or irregular. The regular satellites have nearly circular orbits...

The formation of planetary rings remains a subject of intense research, although their existence can be easily understood in terms of their position relative to the planet that they surround. Each planet has a critical distance from its centre known as its Roche limit, named for Édouard Roche, the 19th-century French mathematician who first explained this concept. The ring systems of...

• Jupiter ( in Jupiter: The ring )

  As the Pioneer 10 spacecraft sped toward its closest approach to Jupiter in 1974, it detected a sudden decrease in the density of charged particles roughly 125,000 km (78,000 miles) from Jupiter, just inside the orbit of its innermost moon, Metis. This led to the suggestion that a moon or a ring of material might be orbiting the planet at this distance. The existence of a ring was verified in...

• Neptune ( in Neptune: The ring system )

  Evidence that Neptune has one or more rings arose in the mid-1980s when stellar occultation studies from Earth occasionally showed a brief dip in the star’s brightness just before or after the planet passed in front of it. Because dips were seen only in some studies and never symmetrically on both sides of the planet, scientists concluded that any rings present do not completely encircle...

• Saturn ( in Saturn: The ring system )

  In 1610 Galileo’s first observations of Saturn with a primitive telescope prompted him to report:

  Saturn is not a single star, but is a composite of three, which almost touch each other, never change or move relative to each other, and are arranged in a row along the zodiac, the middle one being three times larger than the lateral ones.

• Uranus ( in Uranus: The ring system )

  The rings of Uranus were the first to be found around a planet other than Saturn. The American astronomer James L. Elliot and colleagues discovered the ring system from Earth in 1977, nine years before the Voyager 2 encounter, during a stellar occultation by Uranus—i.e., when the planet passed between a star and Earth, temporarily blocking the star’s light. Unexpectedly, they observed the...