Which four planets have rings

Finally, Webb will look at some puzzling features of rings that astronomers are still working to understand. Around Neptune, intermittent regions of thickly clustered particles, known as ring arcs, have been seen to split and evolve, but astronomers need more data to truly understand the processes taking place.

Why Do Planets Have Rings? View All Articles. Though we think of rings as being passive, decorative elements to a planet, they're actually more like an extra-planetary surface. Karkoschka University of Arizona. Webb will investigate their composition. Last Updated: May 31, He used a very simple telescope that he constructed himself from lenses and pointed it at the planets in the night sky.

One of the first objects he looked at was Saturn. Since then, astronomers — who study the universe and everything in it, like planets — have used bigger and better telescopes to find rings around all of the outer gas giant planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus.

These planets, unlike others in our system, consist largely of gas. The first theory states that the rings formed at the same time as the planet. Some particles of gas and dust that the planets are made of were too far away from the core of the planet and could not be squashed together by gravity. They remained behind to form the ring system.

The second theory , and my personal favourite, is that the rings were formed when two of the moons of the planet, which had formed at the same time as the planet, somehow got disturbed in their orbits and eventually crashed into each other an orbit is the circular path that the moon travels on around the planet.

The stuff that was left behind in this huge smash could not come together again to form a new moon. Instead, it spread out into the ring systems we see today. What we do know is that the rings around the various planets are all slightly different from one another, but they all share some characteristics too. The main and halo rings consist of dust ejected from the moons Metis, Adrastea, and other unobserved parent bodies as the result of high-velocity impacts.

The rings of Saturn , meanwhile, have been known for centuries. Although Galileo Galilei became the first person to observe the rings of Saturn in , he did not have a powerful enough telescope to discern their true nature. It was not until that Christiaan Huygens, the Dutch mathematician and scientist, became the first person to describe them as a disk surrounding the planet.

Subsequent observations, which included spectroscopic studies by the late 19th century, confirmed that they are composed of smaller rings, each one made up of tiny particles orbiting Saturn. These particles range in size from micrometers to meters that form clumps orbiting the planet, and which are composed almost entirely of water ice contaminated with dust and chemicals.

In total, Saturn has a system of 12 rings with 2 divisions. It has the most extensive ring system of any planet in our solar system. The rings have numerous gaps where particle density drops sharply. Well beyond the main rings is the Phoebe ring, which is tilted at an angle of 27 degrees to the other rings and, like Phoebe, orbits in retrograde fashion.

The rings of Uranus are thought to be relatively young, at not more than million years old. They are believed to have originated from the collisional fragmentation of a number of moons that once existed around the planet. After colliding, the moons probably broke up into numerous particles, which survived as narrow and optically dense rings only in strictly confined zones of maximum stability. Uranus has 13 rings that have been observed so far.

They are all very faint, the majority being opaque and only a few kilometers wide. The ring system consists mostly of large bodies 0. A few rings are optically thin and are made of small dust particles which makes them difficult to observe using Earth-based telescopes.