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Cool question.
It’s the bigger planets that have the rings, right? And they are in a plane perpendicular to the planet’s rotation, always, right?
Obviously the rings consist of lots of little rocks. They’re all in orbit. They are held there by gravity, but they’re moving round the planet. Question is why only the big planets.
Not sure. Maybe it’s to do with the collisions between the orbiting bits. If you have lots and lots of objects in orbit, and they are colliding, then maybe they all eventually settle down into orbits. If gravity is quite strong, it’s difficult for any one of the bits to escape without hitting another bit and settling back down into an orbit.
With smaller planets, the number of bits in the orbit is smaller, and upon collision it’s easier for the bit to escape?
I’m guessing.
You know what, though. The amount of human-made debris around the earth is building and building. Maybe we’ll one day have a ring around the earth made of junk satellites.
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it comes down to the gravitational pull of the planet, and of the moon (or moons). The sun has a “ring” too. it is called the asteroid belt. it happens that there is no planet orbiting in that region to clear the asteroid belt. the earth’s moon is so big that it essentially sweeps the area around the earth and removes any ring. what about the satellites? their orbits are different from the orbit of objects (eg asteroids, meteors, etc) that pass near the earth. There are certain special orbits that would enable a satellite or asteroid or second moon to remain near a planet, but in general, when there are 3 or more sizable objects moving around each other, their combined gravitational fields interact and remove smaller objects from nearby orbits (ie clears the ring).
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In all honesty, I don’t know. Anything I say will be making things up from the science I know and that’s not fair on anyone. We need an astrophysicist or someone like Edward from the food zone to pop in here with an answer.
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