If Earth Had a Ring Like Saturn

[n2doc]

by Ron Miller

If we had rings in the same proportion to our planet that Saturn's are to it, it is pretty easy to figure out what they would like like from different places on the earth. From the equator the rings would be passing directly overhead. Since you'd be looking in the same plane as the rings, all you would see is a bright line arching from horizon to horizon. Here is what the rings might look like from Quito, Ecuador:



If we travel just a little further north to Guatemala, the rings begin to spread across the sky. The earthlight illuminating the dark side of the moon is many times brighter than we are accustomed to, due to the increased sunlight being reflected from the rings.



Moving to somewhere in Polynesia on the Tropic of Capricorn—at 23° south latitude a 180° panorama gives an idea of what a magnificent sight the rings would be. The dark, oval-shaped break in the middle of the ring is the earth's shadow. During the course of every night you would be able watch it sweep across the ring like the hand of a God's own wristwatch. Here it is midnight, with the shadow at its fullest extent. The edge of the shadow is tinged an orangish-pink as sunlight passes through the earth's atmosphere.



more

http://io9.com/if-earth-had-a-ring-like-saturn-508750253

[Sekhmets Daughter]

1. Glorious! n/t

[liberal N proud]

2. Sci-Fi

[Warren DeMontague]

3. What if it were green and gassy

like Uranus?

[Inkfreak]

5. *snicker*

[awoke_in_2003]

14. How juvenile...

ok, I admit, I am laughing my ass off.

[Warren DeMontague]

17. I shouldn't have, I know.

But I did. I'm not proud, but there it is.

[TexasTowelie]

19. !

[awoke_in_2003]

20. I'm glad you did...

or I might have been forced to do it

[Democracyinkind]

28. Your ass or Uranus?

This is the science group. Where all fine distinctions matter.

[lapfog_1]

26. "Brown-25, because things come out at little different at Uranus"

Brought to you by Uranus Corp.

"Groove Tube"

[Warren DeMontague]

4. Serious answer, it's totally possible that at some point, it might have.

Maybe not to that extent, but..

particularly if the moon was borne from a early collision of a proto-Earth and something else. The material that became the Moon may have hung out in orbit for a while before coalescing into the moon.

That would have been quite a show, had Earth been even close to habitable enough to watch from.

[arcane1]

6. Ok, that is pretty damned cool.

I wonder what sorts of myths we would have come up with, having those in the sky. How those myths would differ depending on latitude.

That said, I'm glad we don't have rings, because I love the dark sky so much

[Inkfreak]

7. Very cool. n/t

[IADEMO2004]

8. Wouldn't the rings reflect/block sunlight and freeze us all? But cool to imagine.

[leveymg]

9. We could blow up the moon to slow global warming.

That would be only slightly a better idea than setting off all those nukes on earth with the same effect.

[IADEMO2004]

12. Martin the Martian still around?

[leveymg]

23. He left with My Mother the Car.

They had a baby boy, DeLorean DMC.

[IADEMO2004]

24. Great! We can blow up the moon go "Back to the Future" and see what happens

and not blow up the moon if it was a bad thing.

[jeff47]

18. No.

Plenty of light would still hit the surface. The rings would not cover the entire sky, and the sun would be hitting them mostly edge-on.

[DCKit]

10. Dude! Let's blow up the moon. Now! nt

[hollysmom]

11. Amazing!! love it.

[DLnyc]

13. Nice

But, as a slight technical point, I don't think the earth's shadow would really "sweep across the ring" each night; rather, the ring, and the shadow along with it, would, I think, sweep across the sky.

[muriel_volestrangler]

22. How would the ring 'sweep'?

The individual tiny rocks that make it up may be moving, but the overall structure that you see stays in the same plane all the time. The shadow, on the other hand, always has to be opposite the sun, so its apex would move from east (at sunset) to south (at midnight) to west (at sunrise).

[DLnyc]

31. Yes, the overall structure stays the same.

Yes, you are right. The apex moves from east to west over the course of the night. What I'm saying is that, ignoring the orbiting behavior of the ring, the ring would ALSO make one apparent rotation every 24 hours, due to the rotation of the earth. Of course, that rotation would not look like much to a viewer on earth without a very powerful telescope, since the fine texture would look pretty much featureless from earth. But (and I agree this is a pretty picky point) it seems to me the shadow doesn't really 'sweep across the ring' so much as it shares the apparent motion of the ring caused by the rotation of the earth. That is all I was saying.

[muriel_volestrangler]

32. The particles in the ring would have some separate apparent motion

if you could follow them ('spokes' that are more, or less, concentrated than average, can sometimes be seen in Saturn's rings, that allow you to follow the motion), because they're all in orbit round the planet - with those closer in moving slightly faster. Like a satellite moving across the sky. Earth and the ring would both be rotating, at different rates, relative to the Sun's shadow.

This is all assuming that the ring coincides exactly with the equator (which the article does, since it says it's always directly overhead for Quito on the equator). Apparently, Saturn's rings are in the same plane as its equator; but I'd wonder what our Moon would do to a ring - it orbits in a plane at 5 degrees away from the (Sun's) ecliptic, but, therefore, between 18 and 28 degrees away from the plane of the equator. My guess is that tidal forces from the Moon wouldn't allow the formation of rings in that plane, and perhaps they'd have to be in the Moon's plane; in which case I think we'd see some variation in the angle of the rings, over the year (just as the angle of the midday Sun varies).

[DLnyc]

37. yes and no, I think

Yes, I agree the rings would have some orbital motion, varying from faster for the closer ones and slower for the further. Somewhere longer that one orbit in 90 minutes (since the article says they would be higher than low satellite orbits) and somewhere shorter than one orbit in 24 hours (since the article says they would be lower than the 'stationary' orbiting satellites). And there would also be added onto that an apparent motion of one rotation every 24 hours, due to the earth's rotation (or subtracted from, depending which direction the rings are orbiting).

And yes, I agree that it seems unlikely the rings could remain stable unless they were in the same plane as the moon, so the equatorial plane assumed by the article seems unlikely and lining up with the moon seems much more reasonable to me.

I can't quite see the angle of the rings' plane changing with respect to the axis of the earth's rotation, but I do think you are correct there would be a change with the seasons. The change I see would be that the view that one location would get of the rings at NOON on the WINTER solstice, say, would be the view that the same location would get at MIDNIGHT on the SUMMER solstice. In other words, I think the rings would go through a daily cycle of getting higher and then lower and then higher again -- but the sun would be up at a slightly different part of the cycle for each day of the year!

Fun to think about!

[curlyred]

15. Ringworld

Larry Niven.

[krispos42]

25. That's my desktop picture...

...Ringworld is a cool concept.

Nested Ringworlds is even cooler, but I can't even begin to imagine the physics behind figuring out how a dozen nested Ringworlds, each on a different tilt, would affect each other.

[Skittles]

16. SO cool

[MrSlayer]

21. I want rings!!!

That is awesome.

[Bay Boy]

29. I want to hear more about God's wristwatch...

....is it a Rolex?

[Laelth]

30. Beautiful. k&r n/t

-Laelth

[merrily]

33. If earth gets a ring,

I can only hope that it is tasteful one.

Lovely graphics. thanks.

[A Little Weird]

34. Very cool!

Thanks for sharing.

[dipsydoodle]

35. Stunning.

[A Simple Game]

36. Could we accumulate enough man made space junk to eventually form a ring? n/t

[Canuckistanian]

38. We'd need several close moons to keep the junk in an equatorial plane

But I suppose it's possible