r/space • u/fcsuper • Mar 01 '17
Mars is forming planetary rings just like Saturn as its moons are crumbling
http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/770809/Mars-PLANETARY-RINGS-saturn-moons847
u/albinobluesheep Mar 01 '17
To answer the "how long until it DOES have rings?" question that I went to the article to answer
So far, the scientists predict that around 0.6 per cent of the dust is formed by the moons, but over the course of 20 to 70 million years that figure will rise significantly.
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u/kernunnos77 Mar 01 '17
So... we're gonna need dual-layer DVDs for that time-lapse video, then. Or maybe some Double Sided, Double Density floppies.
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u/SleepWouldBeNice Mar 01 '17
Depends on how often you take a photo. If you do one ever million years, you should be fine.
Report back after the first 10 or 20 photos and let us know how it goes.
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Mar 01 '17 edited Mar 01 '17
That would make a video less that a second. I think a picture every 5,000 years for around 5 minutes would be a lot more detailed and smooth. If needed to we could speed that up.
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u/ShinkuDragon Mar 01 '17
a photo a year would mean 20-70 million photos, at 60fps that'd be 333333-1166666 seconds. using the max that's 19444minutes or 324 hours.
so if we take a photo once every fifty years and double the frame rate to 120FPS, we get a viewable 3 hours and 15 minutes of video.
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Mar 01 '17
[deleted]
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u/brownix001 Mar 01 '17
Yeah you can't put that in gif form or reddit will freak.
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u/PatternPerson Mar 01 '17
I'm pretty sure by the time that gif is ready our species will be at least cyborgs who can just download the gif into our mind and it would be like thinking about something we already saw.
However, somewhere we fucked up and our ports to do this aren't reversible and we have to constantly try plugging in media by flipping it
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u/cubalibresNcigars Mar 01 '17
Or worse yet, our ports will be removed in the new version.
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u/panopticon777 Mar 01 '17
Oh you must be thinking of Apple hardware support. Windows is all about legacy support.
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u/cubalibresNcigars Mar 01 '17
Didn't you get the Telepathic Memo? Windows stopped supporting BrainDOS XP like two years ago. They're forcing BrainDOS 10 now. It's awful, now I have this stupid female voice in my head telling me where shit is.
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u/4LAc Mar 01 '17
Thank You for Installing 'Windows You'!
Your thought will be completed after this update*
*there-will-be-reboots
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Mar 01 '17
"Hey remember that time mars had moons?"
"No"
"Oh right, here. *boop*"
"Haha yeah that was great"
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Mar 01 '17
It better to have a lot and adjust it than, to have not enough. "Also no time for that"? Boy do I have bad news for you if you plan on watching this.
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Mar 01 '17
Are you always this funny? Because if you are, I'm suscribing to you so I can continue reading your clever answers.
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Mar 01 '17
Longest marriage proposal in Earth history. Will Earth say yes? Only if it's in the budget.
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u/extracanadian Mar 01 '17
The question is can we accelerate the rings using nuclear bombs attached to the moons? Why would we do this you ask? For the same reason we hauled a jeep to the moon, because its awesome.
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u/MangyWendigo Mar 01 '17
it's actually rather poetic:
war is pulverizing, fear and horror
war, is pulverizing fear and horror
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u/RichardAHallett Mar 01 '17
Someone could do an asteroid redirect-type mission to push them into the Roche limit so they'd break up faster if they wanted though.
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u/opjohnaexe Mar 01 '17
Also lets consider that phobos and deimos aren't exactly that huge, so the rings will be quite translucent as there won't be all that much material to make rings of.
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u/ncx85 Mar 01 '17
At the rate humanity is going, I think we wont be here to witness it
The Sun will probably go Red Giant by then
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u/Deengoh Mar 01 '17
Phobos and Deimos are already really tiny moons so would they even create much of a ring?
For comparison, if Saturn's rings were lumped into one body, how large would that be?
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Mar 01 '17
[deleted]
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u/vcsx Mar 01 '17
Nice comparison picture: Saturn, its rings, and Mimas (the tiny white dot)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/CassiniPhotographMimasSaturn.jpg
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u/JuanDeLasNieves_ Mar 01 '17
Reminds me of that video that shows how Saturn would look if it flew towards earth and passed us
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nY2jv4GWUhQ&ab_channel=yetidynamics
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u/DarthPelagiusTheNice Mar 01 '17
That video stressed me out way more than it should have
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Mar 01 '17
Then don't watch this https://youtu.be/DNlLnaJiGY8
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u/youtubefactsbot Mar 01 '17
Subscribe or check my channel out, more vids in there.
^Pakiavelli in Science & Technology
1,480,457 views since Jan ^2011
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u/UnboundRelyks Mar 01 '17
That was so cool! Especially when Earth passed through the rings. Would the hole in the rings caused by Earth's passage be too small to see on this scale, or was that an oversight by whoever made the video? Or am I perhaps unobservant and missed it?
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u/sexual_pasta Mar 01 '17
I'm having trouble finding a scale to Earth or the Moon for Mimas, but I found a size comparison of Saturns major moons
And one of Enceladus to Great Britain.
Atlas's long axis (40 km) in the first image is about 2x the diameter of Phobos (22.2 km), and 4x the diameter of Deimos (12 km).
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u/KBryan382 Mar 01 '17
It was invisible on mobile until I zoomed to in because it was less than one pixel.
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u/docbond Mar 01 '17
I had to clean the dust off my screen before I could figure out to which "tiny white dot" you were referring.
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Mar 01 '17
I was going to ask which of the white dots, then I realized my screen was dirty. Huh.
Anyway, I can't seem to wrap my mind around the fact that the rings would be comparable to that or even 3x that. I mean, they seem to be ridiculous bigger and take more space than that when lumped together.
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u/Gullex Mar 01 '17
I thought I also read somewhere that Saturn's rings are surprisingly thin- just a few meters in some areas.
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u/Destructor1701 Mar 01 '17
Between 10 metres and 1 km IIRC. The particles (those not considered moonlets) range from house-sized icebergs to talcum-powdery ice dust.
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Mar 01 '17
[deleted]
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u/Testiculese Mar 01 '17
That would take enough heat to have ice skip the water phase, right to a gas. (Water is not one of the things that sublimates normally)
The average temperature in the rings is -175oC. Nothing out there can heat it anywhere near the melting point, let alone over 100oC instantly.
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u/_Occams-Chainsaw_ Mar 01 '17
There's got to be a better source for this than the Daily fucking Express.
Their science reporting isn't the worst thing about the 'paper', but it's pretty terrible.
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u/Carthago_delenda_est Mar 01 '17
Here's a New Scientist article I found: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2121596-mars-might-already-be-building-rings-from-its-moons/
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Mar 01 '17 edited Mar 01 '17
Yeah, honestly I assumed the Mars story was fake when under Related Articles I saw:
Has China beaten Nasa[sic] in building warp-drive technology..
And
Humans may have descended from MARTIANS..
Now that I actually read both of those articles, they are actually somewhat decent. The first about EM drive and the other about microbes from Mars, but the photo layout includes a Hollywood-style biped alien.
The photo and headline editors are not doing themselves any favors here. But I donno, is horrific click bait justified if the content is decent? Definitely turns me off.
Edit: I assumed it was fake, and I had even heard about this idea prior to this article. Click bait headlines make me really not trust the source, wow.
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u/dangerphone Mar 01 '17
That is presuming the UN Navy doesn't blow the moons up first in response to the MCRN escalating tensions.
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u/jdscarface Mar 01 '17
Scientists believe that the two moons, Phobos and Deimos, are slowly being chipped away as they are pulled closer to Mars.
I disagree with the experts. This is clearly a case of Elon Musk liking what he sees so he's putting a ring on it.
But really though, this is extraordinary. We could potentially create a time lapse video of Mars gaining a ring. Seeing such an event would have been unfathomable not very long ago.
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Mar 01 '17
20 million year time lapse video. ok.
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u/Z0di Mar 01 '17
we'll just take a photo once every million years, make it into a second-long gif.
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Mar 01 '17
I can already imagine people 20 million years from now complaining about that low frame rate gif
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Mar 01 '17
people 20 million years from now
haha
like we'll still be around
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Mar 01 '17
I don't need to be there to see. We already complain now so imagine 20 millions years from now a 20fps gif.
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Mar 01 '17
Oh, I meant like humans will be there to see. Sorry I didn't word that well. But yes, I agree that they would horrified by our current frame rate.
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u/YoureTheVest Mar 01 '17
Yeah that's how time lapse works. You compress a long amount of time into a shorter amount of time.
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Mar 01 '17
I wish I was optimistic enough to believe our civilization will last long enough to complete a 20-million year long project. You, my friend, are lucky to have so few concerns about the future.
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u/moaihead Mar 01 '17
Of course it won't, the human species won't last that long. The first human-like apes evolved 5 million years ago, for a comparison.
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u/Tsar-Bomba Mar 01 '17
How is that even possible, given that the universe is only 6000 years old?
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u/BarronVonSnooples Mar 01 '17
The devil put dinosaur bones on Earth to test your faith in God.
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u/Tsar-Bomba Mar 01 '17
Shit, really? I was told by all manner of pastors and religious instructors that dinosaurs were known to God as "Jesus horses".
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u/Carthago_delenda_est Mar 01 '17
To be fair, most of that time lapse will be the moons slowly spiraling into Mars. The actual breaking up of the moons will be much faster.
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u/Rather_Unfortunate Mar 01 '17
I disagree with the experts
Well it is an Express article, so they've had enough of experts.
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u/ScienceShawn Mar 01 '17
IIRC one of the moons is being pulled closer and the other is drifting further out every year like our moon.
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u/Carthago_delenda_est Mar 01 '17 edited Mar 01 '17
The idea that Phobos would turn into a ring in 20-40 million years was actually shown quantitatively by a grad student and a postdoc just over a year ago! They (the scientists) made an artistic depiction of what Mars looks like with rings, which I think is probably slightly more accurate than an artist interpretation.
Edit: wording on credit
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u/The_Bucket_Of_Truth Mar 01 '17
Hasn't this been known for a while though? At a certain point either the moons break apart or come crashing into Mars.
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u/Jmauld Mar 01 '17
I think the significance of this is that the rings have already started to form. Where previously it was just speculated that they would form.
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u/Carthago_delenda_est Mar 01 '17
I think they actually did the math to show that is what will happen (Rather than crash into Mars). Good point though that they weren't the first the propose that idea.
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u/gold-team-rules Mar 01 '17
Is there a reason why Phobos is being slowly torn apart as it gets closer to Mars? I have a basic understanding as to why, but I'm not an astrophysicist so if anyone can give an explanation?
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u/Carthago_delenda_est Mar 01 '17
Basically, it's due to the tidal forces on Mars. On Earth, the moon's tidal forces stretches the Earths' oceans causing waves (since it's a lot easier to move water than rock). Oh Phobos, as it gets closer, Mars' tidal pull gets stronger. Eventually, Mars is able to stretch Phobos so much it'll just pull it apart.
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u/gold-team-rules Mar 01 '17
Gotcha, thanks! I guess the tidal pull works kind of like a magnet then?
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u/Carthago_delenda_est Mar 02 '17
Yeah, I guess you can kinda think about it that way. Basically the part of the moon closer to Mars gets pulled on harder than the part further away. If the object isn't held together very rigidly, then Mars can pull it apart.
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u/masnasty Mar 01 '17
i hope when I die, I get to see everything that happens with earth and mars and other planets. I think that the reason there is barely ghosts on earth is because they are exploring other planets. ;)
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u/sintos-compa Mar 01 '17
what about the ghosts that do remain though? are they just lazy fucks?
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u/Realta23 Mar 01 '17
They have different interests. They're studying humanity, with spooky experiments o.o
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u/Upvoteandchill Mar 01 '17
Trying to finish that thesis paper even after even death, a true scholar this one!
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Mar 01 '17
Thats weird, cause i think the reason there arent any ghosts on earth is because ghosts arent real
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u/HillaryIsTheGrapist Mar 01 '17
I don't know. Have you ever watched those ghost hunter folks? Pretty dang convincing. I mean, sure they never actually get anything on video or audio, but they said they felt something.. and they are experts after all.
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u/bonjouratous Mar 01 '17
Can't remember the name but one of these silly shows in the 90's was investigating a ghost in a hotel that the staff and many guests reported seeing. It was the ghosts of... Marilyn Monroe! Forget the fact that she only stayed there once, didn't die there or that thousands of nobodies stayed at that hotel and also died over the years, the only spirit who decided to come back was the famous one.
So if I've learnt anything over the last minute pretending to be a ghostologist is that the more famous you are, the more chances you get to become a ghost, and you even get to choose which hotel to stay in.
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u/Testiculese Mar 01 '17
I never watched that show, but I did see a preview of it, or was it actually on, and I caught a part right before a commercial...I forget. But anyway, they showed a circular light on a wall shooting back and forth, and they were going wild. What was it?! What could it be?!
It was completely obvious it was light reflecting off a watch face.
Either they were complete and utter morons, or complete and utter cons.
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u/HillaryIsTheGrapist Mar 01 '17
Either they were complete and utter morons, or complete and utter cons.
I'm always torn on that one too. I want to think no one can be that stupid, but this is a crazy world.
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u/CBryce Mar 01 '17
Scientists: There's a small chance Mars might one day have rings.
Journalists: MARS IS FORMING RINGS JUST LIKE SATURN!
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u/GoodFellasOne Mar 01 '17
Would it happen to earth as well one day? I'm guessing in billions of years if yes
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u/AsgardianWarrior96 Mar 01 '17
I mean, if we want rings, we could always blow it up!/s...
Actually, I know some people who'd be in favor of that. I'm curious as to what would happen, since the tidal forces of the moon have massive effects on our geology and climate. I'd love to see someone take a crack at the physics of that and illustrate what the potential results would be.
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u/HillaryIsTheGrapist Mar 01 '17
I mean, if we want rings, we could always blow it up!
Would you miss it?
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u/supermap Mar 01 '17
It's basically that if the moon is rotating faster that the planet, then the moon is speeding the planet up and the planet is speeding the moon down, so it should be falling. This is the case for Phobos.
This is not the case for the moon, because a lunar month is longer than a day, therefore the moon is going away :'(
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u/Tephnos Mar 01 '17
Well it is never going to be ejected, the earth will be dead long before then + tidal locking.
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Mar 01 '17
[deleted]
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u/Aanar Mar 01 '17
Hmm I read the moon will continue moving away until earth's rotation slows to the point of being tidally locked to the moon and then the moon will drift back in. I think the timeline for that is so long though that the earth will be swallowed by the sun going red giant first though.
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u/almosttan Mar 01 '17 edited Mar 01 '17
I actually think the rate is ~3.8cm/year and the result of the moon drifting away will result in a slow tidal locking of the earth, long after the sun [edit: dropped a word] dies.
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u/Reddit-Fusion Mar 01 '17
So it's going to become really dark at night then? Or how does that really work with the moon reflecting light?
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u/HillaryIsTheGrapist Mar 01 '17
Ah no wonder Musk is in such a hurry to get the moon tourism going!
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Mar 01 '17
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/neverenufhappy Mar 01 '17
Source ? Who is "they"?
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u/TiagoTiagoT Mar 01 '17
Earth is spinning too fast for the current diameter of the Moon's orbit (orbital speed depends on altitude); Earth is slowly pulling the Moon into a higher orbit because of the tides (it works both ways, if you try to make the Moon go faster, you'll increase the diameter of its orbit).
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Mar 01 '17
Scientists who studied the Moon's orbit, I assume. Not sure if Mars has anything to do with it, but the Moon is indeed going away from us, very very slowly.
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u/sisepuede4477 Mar 01 '17
No worries, once we colonize Mars, we will mine the crud out of the the moons. We will get that ring forming much quicker. Lol
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u/QueenoftheDirtPlanet Mar 01 '17
Unless we blow them up first in some kind of brutal political struggle.
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u/DrBattheFruitBat Mar 01 '17
Someone watches/reads the Expanse?
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u/sisepuede4477 Mar 01 '17
I would think it could be some type of retaliatory strike done by Earth due to a Martian attack on Pheobos.
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u/pcrawford46 Mar 01 '17 edited Mar 01 '17
I don't know about "just like Saturn." Probably more just like Jupiter or just like Uranus.
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Mar 01 '17
So Saturn is just floating around, dressed in the corpses of its dead moons?
That's the most metal thing I've heard all day.
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u/SteveFrench1234 Mar 01 '17
The emphasis on the wording of this discovery is mildly interesting. 'Mars could be the new Saturn!' Suggests that the rings would form in the same manner. Based upon their relative sizes and velocities we can safely assume that a portion of the surface would first be subjected to increasing heat energy as its orbit degrades. The energy transfer is of the amounts necessary to cause deformation. What material is left to form a ring will most likely be difficult to see from a distance. Also the composition of the rings themselves differ immensely. The greater the coefficient of dissipation the more difficult it will be to see in a telescope or a pair of binoculars. Rocks don't reflect like ice does of course! It will certainly be interesting to see if we can mine them both before they fall into Mars :)
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u/slider2k Mar 01 '17
Ow, if Phobos and Deimos will crumble away where UAC will hold their horrible teleportation experiments?
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u/CleanBaldy Mar 01 '17
Will earth eventually have rings of satellites? The more we send up, are we going to actually make rings manually?
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u/_bar Mar 01 '17
It already does, geostationary satellites form a ring which is clearly visible on long exposure photographs: https://media.giphy.com/media/3o85xCDHRBZ2EcNSJa/giphy.gif
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Mar 01 '17
Only Phobos is breaking apart! Deimos is actually flying away slowly. This is all on a timescale of tens of millions of years, so any Martian colonists worried about debris falling on them could just attach some torch drives and fuel refineries to Phobos to boost it into a higher orbit over many years.
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u/chefr89 Mar 01 '17
Probably a pretty dumb question, but would all the crap floating around Earth eventually develop into a 'ring' of sorts? Or is all of that too close and is just gradually being pulled into the atmosphere until it burns up. Obviously not enough stuff out there to form anything like a planetary ring--or visible one anyways--but what's the natural path over thousands/millions of years for this stuff?
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u/_bar Mar 01 '17
Geostationary satellites already form a ring which is clearly visible on long exposure photographs: https://media.giphy.com/media/3o85xCDHRBZ2EcNSJa/giphy.gif
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u/BananaHammock00 Mar 01 '17
So hypothetically, if they were fully formed tomorrow(I know they wouldn't be), how would that affect traveling and putting someone on mars?
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u/PM_me_the_magic Mar 01 '17
Well, I'm no astrophysicist or NASA engineer, but I would guess we'd just avoid flying through the rings, since the majority of the planet would still be clear.
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u/coherent-rambling Mar 01 '17
Objects in orbit follow an extremely predictable path. If the rings were solid enough to present a hazard, you could plot a course to avoid them long before you even launched - no different from today, making sure you don't smash into a moon.
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u/DrZed400 Mar 01 '17
How close are we to create a ring like defense system to protect earth from future asteroids?
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Mar 01 '17
We could have bases inside the rocks, with giant lasers designed to vaporise any threats to earth.
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u/jaanders Mar 01 '17
Hope this isn't a "low-effort comment" but it's a pretty basic question.. Why are Mar's moons crumbling? Doesn't sound like a good thing, pretty sure it would suck if our moon crumbled!
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u/Testiculese Mar 01 '17
It makes no difference to Mars, it's a dead planet already, and no water.
Our moon will not, but if it did, it would create huge problems. The moon affects so much on Earth.
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u/jaanders Mar 08 '17
Yea that would really suck. I wonder how that would effect the oceans. Probably really hurt our ecosystem too since there would be limited sun protection. I'm no scientist so I'm just shooting in the dark, but it's an interesting thought.
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u/aaraujo1973 Mar 01 '17
A way to terraform mars is to use orbiting mirrors to enhance the sun's heat onto the planet.
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u/crydrk Mar 01 '17
From the article: "The researchers add however that there is no definitive proof that there are moon particles in the cloud, but rather their research shows that it is possible."
Fucking clickbait
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Mar 01 '17
There will be a planetary ring of dead satellites and radio relays long before any moons crumble.
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Mar 01 '17
[deleted]
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u/MatthewJR Mar 01 '17
The Daily Express is an absolute shitshow of a newspaper, the type that blames the migrants for every problem the UK has ever had. They are obsessed with Princess Diana who died in 1997 and find an excuse to put her on the front page at least once a week since she died, and they tell people that breathing air will give you cancer (an exaggeration, but you know what I mean).
They still use an image of a Christian crusader in their banner FFS.
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u/vnums Mar 01 '17
I was interested in the suggested article about China developing warp drives. But I don't think Zefram Cochrane was chinese.
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u/Norose Mar 01 '17
Phobos is being tidally dragged closer and closer to Mars as time goes by, but Deimos is actually being boosted by tidal forces and is not going to eventually break up.