RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — Saturn could soon be getting a ringed cousin. Mars is set to develop rings. It’s largest moon Phobos is slowly drifting into the red planet, and in about 20 million years time will break up and rings that would prevail almost 100 million years.
UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Benjamin Black and graduate student Tushar Mittal estimate the cohesiveness of Phobos and conclude that it is insufficient to resist the tidal forces that will pull it apart when it gets closer to Mars.
Just as Earth’s moon pulls on our planet in different directions, raising tides in the oceans, for example, so too Mars tugs differently on different parts of Phobos. As Phobos gets closer to the planet, the tugs are enough to actually pull the moon apart, the scientists say.
The resulting rubble from Phobos – rocks of various sizes and a lot of dust – would continue to orbit Mars and quickly distribute themselves around the planet in a ring.
While the largest chunks would eventually spiral into the planet and collide at a grazing angle to produce egg-shaped craters, the majority of the debris would circle the planet for millions of years until these pieces, too, drop onto the planet in ‘moon’ showers, like meteor showers. Only Mars’ other moon, Deimos, would remain.
Black and Mittal, both in UC Berkeley’s Department of Earth and Planetary Science, were drawn to the question of what might happen to Phobos because its fate is expected to be so different from that of most other moons in our solar system.
