Thank you, I needed that! ;)
So how long have the rings been there?
oh please...
Is this another Elmo story?
Carl Sagan of Cornell explained this in one of his books I read. Intense gravity can cause a star, composed of elemental hydrogen and helium, of a certain mass to collapse upon itself, producing heavier elements (like gold) in the process. Then it blow out all the mass and this mass slowly agglomerates into a new star and planets. Sagan believed that there was another solar system prior to the current one whose detritus then settled into the current form, heavy metals included.
Starting, of course, with the HUGE ASSUMPTION that rings have to be as old as the planet, and CAN’T POSSIBLY have been formed more recently.
oh please...
I never did see the reason why the rings present a problem for astronomers who hold an old universe view. There is another alternative. The rings could have been formed recently from an impact or from a pulverized moon. I don’t see this as proof of a young (thousands of years) old solar system. Scientists are not inventing imaginary moons they are theorizing that there could be moons that we don’t see having an effect on the rings.
The website’s comments are pure garbage. All large bodies of matter accumulate rings of orbital matter into an accretion disk due to the force of gravity. All such accretion disks dissipate over time as the orbits of the matter decays andd the matter either falls into the attractor mass or achieves enough velocity to reach escape velocity and leave orbit. The rings we see today are a combination of the matter remaining from the proto-planetary disk and the replenishment matter from the breakup of asteroids, comets, and moons who entered the planet’s Roche limit.
The Roche limit is the distance from the planet where the gravitaional pull from different regions of the planet are sufficient to break apart and approaching comet, asteroid, moon, dwarf planet, or planet. The debris remaining in the temporarily stable orbit forms a ring due to the flattening effects over time of the planetary rotation.
Jupitaer’s tenuous rings were very slightly replenished with some of the debris resulting from the breakup and impact of the Comet Shoemaker-Levy.
Wipe the rings off uranus and flush!
This commentary is flawed in every way imaginable.
Of all the errors, the most fundamental is the assumption that if the universe is, say, 3 billion years old, then everything in it and all its forms are also 3 billion years old. That’s an obvious crock. All phenomena are transient, taking place within a very old matrix of time and space, but which are themselves most fleeting and temporary.
Would anyone take seriously an argument that the universe is young because it has young forms in it? Has no one ever seen breath on a cold day or heard a child’s laugh?
Very young and very fresh, despite being embedded within an ancient universe.
Rings around planets are, in a sense, just as fleeting. They were not formed at the beginning of time nor will they be there at the end. And neither will we.
So what?
The Uranian system is really wonky anyway. With such a high axial tilt and moons that have apparently undergone significant stress, unlike pretty much every other planetary system, it would be only logical to assume that the rings are the result of some more recent process than the planet’s original formation.
December 1988 and you just get around to posting this NOW?
Uranus gathers no moss, that’s for sure.
Good grief, this washed-up young-earth canard was debunked years ago. Will the young-earth cult never learn?
What do the Starship Enterprise and a wad of toilet paper have in common?
They both circle uranus in search of klingons!
The age of rings don’t do anything to infer the age of the planet. The rings of Saturn are also younger than the planet.
,,,,,, sometimes one wipe won’t do it ,,, try two or three times for better luck .