Scott Tremaine, “Astrophysical Wonders” (Open Agenda, 2021)
New Books in Science, Technology, and Society
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How Do We Know That?
From theoretical arguments, you can estimate how long the current configuration should last. The optimistic way to think about it is that a saturn's ring is a very unusual and rare occurrence. It could be that the generic process for the ring is that a angi momentum is transferred outi transferred from the ring to the satellite. As the ring particles get further and further ot they become more gravitationally unstable, and then they condense into a new satellite. But a nobody's been able to make that theory work quantitatively yet.
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