Can adding mass to a ringed planet cause a huge chain reaction?
I've been wondering about this for a while. Here is the research I've done so far that lead me to ask this question:
- A planetary ring system is most often formed by the breakup of objects within the Roche limit of a planet.
- Higher mass objects exert a greater force on its surrounding material (this is just a generalized statement; I am aware it is much more complicated than that, involving the mass of both objects as well as their distance and several other factors)
This makes me wonder if it is possible under certain circumstances that adding enough mass to a planet with a ring system can cause a massive chain reaction. This process might involve the following steps:
- A series of large collisions impact the planet, which increases its mass.
- The objects nearest to the planet in the innermost layers of the ring system experience orbital decay, eventually leading them to crash into the planet.
- This then adds even more mass to the planet, which causes this pattern to repeat itself until equilibrium is met. (such as a gap existing in the rings, where the nearest part of the ring system remains stable in spite of the added mass, which prevents further orbital decay)
Can adding mass to a ringed planet cause a massive chain reaction?
I have my doubts about whether this is possible:
- It's possible that the amount of mass added to a planet by the collapse of a portion of a ring system is not large enough to cause a chain reaction
- Perhaps the ring system would simply get a bit closer to the planet to compensate for the added mass
My guess is that it's possible under the right circumstances. Perhaps the innermost part of a ring system lies right outside an area that would exhibit enough atmospheric or electromagnetic drag to cause orbital decay. And maybe the ring system is primarily composed of a dense material such as iron (rather than rock and ice) which could add enough mass to the planet to allow this process to repeat itself.
Answers should:
- Say yes, no, or maybe and provide detailed supporting evidence, links or any other helpful knowledge that pertains to the question
If the answer is yes, this is possible, this could potentially help me to explain the formation of a giant, equatorial gash as is explored in my question How Can I Explain a Giant Equatorial Gash?. However, this question should be treated as an independent and unrelated issue.
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1 answer
It's an interesting scenario. The major problem is that ring systems tend to be quite low-mass in comparison to their parent bodies. For example, measurements by Cassini indicate that in the case of Saturn, the ratio of ring mass to planet mass is $M_R/M_p\simeq2.7\times10^{-8}$ (Iess et al. 2019). Even in the notable case of 1SWASP J1407b, whose ring system is arguably close to an accretion disk, we have $M_R/M_p\simeq6.6\times10^{-6}$. It should be quite clear that even accreting a substantial portion of the ring system will not significantly change the Roche limit of the planet, which scales as $d\propto M_p^{1/3}$, as Starfish Prime has said - in other words, extremely weakly.
Here are the characteristics of a system liable to form a ring system of significant mass:
- A lack of other planets to accrete gas and dust, thereby allowing one planet to accumulate a large system of satellites.
- A highly massive giant planet, with a large Roche limit.
- A young system, meaning there is still plenty of material around to form satellites and rings - or a massive disk similar to that of 1SWASP J1407b.
- A lack of shepherd moons, which would provide a stabilizing effect for the rings even in the event of some catastrophic cascade.
- Possibly an Earth-like satellite capable of being tidally disrupted by the planet.
An interesting side possibility is that of a ring system stabilized by both gravity and the planet's magnetic field, as I discussed in another answer. The regime of stability is determined by a parameter called $L_*$, proportional to the planet's angular speed $\Omega_p$ and inversely proportional to its mass $M_p$. Therefore, if a large object impacted the planet, its mass would increase and its rotation would decrease (by conservation of angular momentum). This could strongly reduce $L_*$, bringing it into a regime where the rings are unstable - assuming the mass-to-charge ratio of ring particles is sufficiently small.
Morris the Cat makes an excellent point about particle size - small particles won't result in cratering, and will in fact likely burn up in the atmosphere during reentry. As the distribution of particles in rings is strongly skewed towards smaller particles (I believe it's something like $n\propto a^{-6}$, where $a$ is the particle radius), you're not going to see many large chunks in the rings. This is especially the case if you want chunks with small mass-to-charge ratios, because it's harder for large collections of particles to maintain significant net charges without separating thanks to the strong electric forces involved.
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