Why do some planets have rings?

Since ancient times, it was thought that Saturn was the only planet in the solar system with a ring. But it turned out not to be.

The ring around Saturn was discovered by an astronomer Galileo Galilei nearly 400 years ago. He used a very simple telescope built by himself, made from lenses, then directed it towards the planets in the night sky. One of the first objects he saw was Saturn. At first, he thought that Saturn had two large moons on either side of the planet because his telescope was not very good and only produced very blurry images.

At present, we still do not know how the ring around the planets works.

Since then, astronomers - who study the universe and everything inside it, like planets - have used bigger and better telescopes to find rings around them. gas giant planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus. These planets, unlike other planets in our system, are composed primarily of gas.

It is unclear how the rings around planets work, or how they are formed. But there are some theories as follows:

1. The first theory says that rings formed at the same time as the planet. Some particles of gas and dust, which contribute to the planet's formation, are too far from the core and cannot be pulled together by gravity. Therefore, they had to "stay" in space and form a ring system.
2. The second hypothesis is that rings formed when two planets' moons - formed at the same time with the planet - had for some reason crashed in their orbits and eventually collided with each other. (an orbit is a circle along which the Moon moves around the planet.) The remnants of this terrible collision cannot be joined together to form a new Moon. Instead, they disperse into space and form the ring systems we see today.

Because no one knows what the exact answer is , we must continue to explore and try many different theories.

What we don't know is that the rings around many different planets are a little different from other rings, but they do share some characteristics.

First, they all have a much larger width than the thickness. For example, Saturn's ring is about 280,000 km across, but only 200 meters thick. It can be likened to a pancake placed on a 14km wide dish.

All rings around the planets also have gaps that sometimes reach several kilometers wide.

Another thing is that all ring systems are made up of small particles of ice and ice. The smallest particles are about the size of dust particles, while the largest ones are about 20 meters in diameter - roughly the size of a schoolyard. Every ring around the planets has gaps that are sometimes several kilometers wide - at first no one knows why this gap exists, but then we discover that they are caused by the moons. Small sizes have "gnawed" all the material in that area.

The biggest difference between Saturn's rings and other gas giants is that the particles that make up Saturn's rings are able to reflect sunlight towards Earth very well. That means they will appear very bright, explaining why we can see this ring from Earth using just a regular telescope. The number of particles in Saturn's rings is also very large, making this ring much larger and wider. That's another reason they are more noticeable than the rings of other gas giants.

The particulate matter that makes up the rings of Uranus and Neptune contains elements that when the Sun shines into it will turn dark. These dark matter particles look a lot like the pieces of coal or charcoal you use to light a fire. That makes them very difficult to see because they do not reflect the sunlight towards us as much as the rings of Saturn.