 If I were to ask you what your favorite planet in the solar system was, what would you say? My favorite is Easily Saturn. It's the sixth planet from the sun and it's one of the biggest in the solar system, second only to Jupiter. It's a type of planet that we call a gas giant. It's likely got a metallic core surrounded by layers of liquid and an outer layer of gas. But it isn't its massive size that has interested people for so long. It's its ring system. Saturn's rings are a beautiful natural phenomenon that have fascinated and puzzled astronomers for millennia. In 1610 Galileo became the first person to see Saturn's rings and he was captivated instantly. But he didn't think there were rings. Instead, he thought there were three separate bodies that didn't move around each other. In 1655 Christiane Huygens became the first to realize that Saturn actually had rings. But fast forward to today and we've discovered far more than Galileo and Huygens ever would have dreamt possible about Saturn and its rings. And we've even been there a few times. The most recent and potentially most interesting spacecraft to visit the gas giant was the Cassini Huygens spacecraft. The Huygens part of the spacecraft actually dropped down into Titan which is Saturn's largest moon. But the Cassini part of the spacecraft carried on to the gas giant to perform multiple fly bys of the planet and its moons. It revolutionized our understanding of Saturn and its ring system and it even treated us to some of the most breathtaking images of them that we've seen today like these. So the rings are constantly changing but there are seven clearly defined ring groups. These main rings extend out to around 282,000 km but what might surprise you is that the main ring's thickness is sometimes only around 30 feet but it can reach up to around 300 feet. It's often thought that Saturn's ring system is unique but in fact ring systems are quite common. All four of our solar systems gas giants have a ring system. Jupiter and Neptune have extremely faint rings whilst Uranus has a slightly brighter ring but when compared to Saturn it's still very dim. Some minor planets orbiting the outer solar system have even been found to have rings so it's safe to assume that planets even outside of our solar system could have rings as well. But if ring systems are so common then how do they form? Well to understand that first we've got to look at what's called the Roche limit. Now every planet has a Roche limit and it's essentially a radius around the planet where if an object enters into that radius gravitational forces from the planet acting unevenly across the object will tear the object apart. These uneven gravitational forces are called tidal forces and if that sounds familiar it's no surprise it's the same sort of uneven gravitational force that makes the moon cause the tides here on earth. And it's this idea of a Roche limit that is key to the forming of a planet's rings. Essentially though there are two options that it comes down to. Either Saturn's rings are almost as old as the planet itself or they're younger. But if they're old they're likely the product of the leftover material and dust from the beginning of our solar system and roughly 4 billion years old. But there's a lot of evidence that suggests this isn't the case. Some of the evidence includes the fact that they are just too bright. The rings are picking up dust all of the time and the Cassini probe measured how much of this is falling onto it during its 13 year stay and it found that there's way too much dust pollution for them to maintain this sort of shine after billions of years. So the other possibility is that it's a lot younger than Saturn and it's possible that it has something to do with one of Saturn's many moons. A moon with the mass almost equivalent of the rings themselves may have had its orbit disrupted a few hundred million years ago and found itself inside Saturn's Roche limit being torn apart by the planet's tidal forces. What's quite interesting about the idea that the rings could be that young is that when dinosaurs started to rule the earth, Saturn didn't have these rings. So any keen dino astronomers wouldn't have been able to see these rings even if they were looking. However, these are just a few of the many ideas floating around. In reality, we don't know if the rings are young or old and therefore how they were formed. Some even think that the confusion around the age of the rings can be explained by some sort of recycling mechanism within the rings where they form and then they accrete into moons and then these moons shatter and form new rings in a repeating process every few hundred million years and essentially what they're suggesting is an old system that just appears new. All we really know is that as we continue to explore the solar system and the universe around us, we'll learn more about the complex mechanisms behind planetary ring systems and just maybe we'll solve the mystery behind one of the most beautiful sites in our nice sky. Thanks for watching guys, let us know any thoughts you have down in the comments and let us know any topics you'd like us to cover in the future down in the comments as well. If you haven't yet, feel free to head over to our Patreon page where you can actually support us on a monthly basis. 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