A look at planetary rings, especially those of Saturn where house-sized chunks of ice orbit at 53,000 MPH along a chaotic orbital racetrack; how the rings formed and the dangers they pose to spacecraft. Also a look at other rings around Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, and possibly Mars; plus Earth's "ring" which is made of some 200 satellites in geosynchronous orbit -- the only "man made ring" in the known universe. A planetary ring is a ring of cosmic dust and other small particles orbiting around a planet in a flat disc-shaped region. The most notable planetary rings known in the Solar System are those around Saturn, but the other three gas giants of the Solar System (Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune) also possess ring systems of their own. Reports in March 2008 have suggested that the Saturnian moon Rhea may have its own tenuous ring system, which would make it the only moon known to possess a ring system. A later study published in 2010 revealed that imaging of Rhea from the Cassini mission was inconsistent with the predicted properties of the rings, suggesting that some other mechanism is responsible for the magnetic effects that had led to the ring hypothesis. There are three ways that thicker planetary rings (the rings around planets) have been proposed to have formed: from material of the protoplanetary disk that was within the Roche limit of the planet and thus could not coalesce to form moons; from the debris of a moon that was disrupted by a large impact; or from the debris of a moon that was disrupted by tidal stresses when it passed within the planet's Roche limit. Most rings were thought to be unstable and to dissipate over the course of tens or hundreds of millions of years, but it now appears that Saturn's rings might be quite old, dating to the early days of the Solar System. Fainter planetary rings can form as a result of meteoroid impacts with moons orbiting around the planet or, in case of Saturn's E-ring, the ejecta of cryovolcanic material. The composition of ring particles varies; they may be silicate or icy dust. Larger rocks and boulders may also be present, and in 2007 tidal effects from eight 'moonlets' only a few hundred meters across were detected within Saturn's rings. Sometimes rings will have "shepherd" moons, small moons that orbit near the outer edges of rings or within gaps in the rings. The gravity of shepherd moons serves to maintain a sharply defined edge to the ring; material that drifts closer to the shepherd moon's orbit is either deflected back into the body of the ring, ejected from the system, or accreted onto the moon itself. Several of Jupiter's small innermost moons, namely Metis and Adrastea, are within Jupiter's ring system and are also within Jupiter's Roche limit.[8] It is possible that these rings are composed of material that is being pulled off these two bodies by Jupiter's tidal forces, possibly facilitated by impacts of ring material on their surfaces. Uranus' ε ring also has two shepherd satellites, Cordelia and Ophelia, acting as inner and outer shepherds respectively. Both moons are well within Uranus' synchronous orbit radius, and their orbits are therefore slowly decaying due to tidal deceleration. Neptune's rings are very unusual in that they first appeared to be composed of incomplete arcs in Earth-based observations, but Voyager 2's images showed them to be complete rings with bright clumps. It is thought that the gravitational influence of the shepherd moon Galatea and possibly other as-yet undiscovered shepherd moons are responsible for this clumpiness. Pluto is not known to have any ring systems. However, some astronomers think that the New Horizons probe might find a ring system when it visits in 2015. It is also predicted that Phobos, a moon of Mars, will break up and form into a planetary ring in about 50 million years due to its low orbit.

• published: 11 Dec 2013
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