Research model suggests moons of some planets developed from
ringsNovember 30th, 2012 in Space & Earth / Astronomy This is an
image of the planet Uranus taken by the spacecraft Voyager 2 in
1986. Image: NASA (Phys.org)—French researchers Sébastien
Charnoz and Aurélien Crida have proposed in a paper published in
the journal Science that moons that orbit some of the planets in
our solar system came about due to accretion from material in
rings that used to surround the planets, rather than as entities
that took shape while their host planets were forming. Space
researchers have long proposed that moons circulating planets
generally came to exist in one of three ways: as entities that
formed on their own as their host was developing, as clumps that
coalesced from material shed from a planet struck by some other
body, or by being captured as they passed by. In this new
research, Charnoz and Crida propose a fourth possibility – that
the moons were formed from material in rings that surrounded
their host planet. In