Is Saturn a rarity?

[jabeoo1]

Simple question I keep asking myself.

In the big scheme of things how rare is a ringed planet like Saturn?  I have had conversations with like minded friends on the topic and was intrigued by what you all thought on this.

[julianr]

There are rings round other pkanets

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[Knight of Clear Skies]

Very difficult to say. Ring systems are fairly common - there is even at least one asteroid with rings - but nothing else in the solar system comes close to matching Saturn. It's not known whether Saturn's rings formed with the planet or were created later when a moon broke up under tidal forces. We really don't know how typical our solar system is, so it's not possible to say how many Saturn's are out there.

Triton's orbit is slowly decaying, so it's thought that it Neptune will have a major ring system in a few billion years time, when it approaches Neptune's Roche limit and disintegrates.

[brantuk]

Jupiter has rings - but they're so faint and spread out it's impossible to see them. I think one of the outer planets has a ring system too iirc (either Neptune or Uranus) - but again too faint to see.

[ronin]

Saturn is just the most noticeable of the 3 that have rings in our solar system.

So as we have 8 (or 9) that is a fairly high percentage of the planets we have detailed knowledge of that have rings.

[Knight of Clear Skies]

One thing to bear in mind is that there are different mechanisms for producing rings. The fainter ones can be produced by outgassing moons or by micrometeorite impacts on their surfaces, but Saturn's major rings are thought either to be a disrupted moon or trapped material from the protoplanetary disc.

When New Horizons gets to Pluto next year we should find out if Pluto has a ring system.

[jabeoo1]

Cool thanks everyone.....I forgot about the faint rings on the other planets ! 

Would it be possible to detect an exoplanet's ring system if it were not too tenuous using current technology ?  

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Would it be possible to detect an exoplanet's ring system if it were not too tenuous using current technology ?  

Perhaps not impossible but unlikely I'd guess. We've just started to look at the atmospheres of exoplanets as they pass in front of their parent stars. However, the transit method is strongly biased towards planets in very close orbits. I'm dubious whether a ring system around such a planet would be stable for any length of time, due to the tidal forces from the star.

There is a nice page here about the different methods of exoplanet detection and their strengths and weaknesses.

[David_Pickles]

I believe there are 4 known bodies within the solar system that have identifiable rings - Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and there is even an asteroid (Chariklo) that has been found to have a ring system, so I guess that having 4 ringed bodies within our own system would indicate that they are probably relatively common throughout the universe.

Link to a news article about Chariklo - http://www.space.com/25225-asteroid-rings-discovery-video-images.html

Regards,

David

[Steve Ward]

Saturn , Jupiter , Uranus , Neptune and 10199 Charilko makes five known objects so far in our insignificant little Solar System , hardly a rarity methinks ... 

[Knight of Clear Skies]

And none of those other ring systems rival Saturn's, possibly because the formation mechanisms are different. It's a perfectly sensible question to ask and an interesting one to explore, even if we can't answer it.

[soundwave]

By the way.. apparently a ringed exo-planet has been possibly detected in 2012 (a "Saturn on steroids")

http://www.space.com/14219-strange-rings-saturn-steroids-deep-space-aas219.html

The short version is that there's a certain star (420 light-years away), which has a (maybe) planet orbiting it.

The dip in brightness that was detected was different than expected and had breaks in it (much like the breaks in Saturn's rings). 

I couldn't really find a follow-up for that discovery... so I don't know what became of it.