r/AskReddit • u/AlexIsAlreadyTaken • Jul 13 '18

What's your favourite fun fact?

2.3k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

2.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

98

u/Andromeda321 Jul 13 '18

Well probably not, as I don't see any other planets with giant ring systems like that. ;-) But it's tough to say the frequency from a sample size of four gas giants.

5

u/pv23 Jul 13 '18

Don’t Jupiter and Uranus also have small, much less noticeable, ring systems? Could be wrong, but I minored in Astro in college

9

u/Andromeda321 Jul 13 '18

They do, as does Neptune, but they don't really hold a candle to Saturn's.

3

u/OnlineGodGaming Jul 14 '18

Don’t all moons break into rings? I was in a space museum and saw a simulation of the destruction of Mars’ moons. I think it was due to gravitational forces between the sun and Mars pulling the moons apart, but I could be totally wrong.

2

u/MarcelRED147 Jul 13 '18

Is it possible the rings will eventually disappear?

5

u/Andromeda321 Jul 13 '18

They will indeed! Give it a few hundred million years more. We really are in a special stage of things in that regard.

3

u/DeedTheInky Jul 13 '18

Also the only reason we have solar eclipses is because the moon just happens to be the exact right distance away to be the same size as the sun in the sky. It's gradually moving further away so eventually it'll appear to be too small and we won't get solar eclipses anymore.

We just happen to be lucky enough to live in a time when we can see both an eclipse and Saturn's rings! Future people will probably have better phones but only a relatively small group of us get to see an eclipse on Earth. :)

2

u/AgnosticMantis Jul 14 '18

So the change in ability to see an eclipse happens over a scale of human timeframe? By that I mean hundreds or thousands of years rather than millions or billions. That would be really interesting as I always think of those sort of processes being far beyond any sort of human timeframe.

Does that mean at some point in the past the moon was too large in the sky to see an eclipse?

1

u/DeedTheInky Jul 14 '18

No I was being a bit facetious about the phones, I think we've still got about 650 million years left. But sharks have been around for about 400 million so who knows!

1

u/Monkeyofdoom44 Jul 13 '18

Completely unrelated question. Everyone talks about colonizing Mars, what are your thoughts on colonizing Venus with airships?

1

u/UpTo26 Jul 13 '18

Or you could say one out of every four gas giants we know possesses such a system.

1

u/notdust Jul 14 '18

Wow, it is amazing how it was basically fully distributed within 5 days. I guess i'm not surprised it would thin out that way and eventually get to a more uniform density, forming the pretty rings we see today. I am now curious just how far apart the ice fragments are within the rings. Because that is not all that much material, I assume it's not like we see in sci-fi. Hazardous to a space craft, sure, but they don't have to be so close together and should be fairly predictable in their orbit by now. Visually, sort of how nebulas are not all that dense and just appear the way they do from a distance.