The more we look at space the weirder it gets..

[Clive HartlandParticipant @clivehartland94829]

When you look at the rings around a Planet you see that there are gaps and I often wondered about this.

Then one day I saw that a larger object was going around in the track and came to the conclusion that the larger object was slower and therefore made the gap that way.

Clive

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

Posted by Clive Hartland on 14/03/2017 13:54:59:

When you look at the rings around a Planet you see that there are gaps and I often wondered about this.

Then one day I saw that a larger object was going around in the track and came to the conclusion that the larger object was slower and therefore made the gap that way.

Clive

Planets within the rings orbit at the same speed as dust in the same orbit, but any dust with a slightly different orbit will go ever so slightly faster or slower and over the millennia the moon will hover them up. Also various tidal effects from other moons disturb the orbits of ring material.

Some very tiny moons can't make a gap, but distort the pattern of the dust to create shapes called 'propellors' (guess what they look like…)

In one case two moons hare a gap in saturn's rings with orbits only a few km different, curiously it works out so that when the faster one catches up, they swap orbits!

[Nick HulmeParticipant @nickhulme30114]

Posted by Cornish Jack on 13/03/2017 12:51:11:

Original thread title suggested space was weird – given the responses so far, perhaps the weirdness is closer to home???

rgds

Bill

Perhaps the Weirdness is in the eye of the beholder

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