- If Earth had rings, would they center on the equator like Saturn's rings do on its equator?
Newtonian Mechanics – What If Earth Had Rings? Exploring the Consequences
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There seems to be a known explanation. I quote from Composition, Structure, Dynamics, and Evolution of Saturn’s Rings, Larry W. Esposito (Annu. Rev. Earth Planet. Sci. 2010.38:383-410):
[The] rapid collision rate explains why each ring is a nearly flat disk. Starting with a set of particle orbits on eccentric and mutually inclined orbits (e.g., the fragments of a small, shattered moon), collisions between particles dissipate energy but also must conserve the overall angular momentum of the ensemble. Thus, the relative velocity is damped out, and the disk flattens after only a few collisions to a set of nearly coplanar, circular orbits.
I think the key is that particles in a thick ring would not move in parallel planes but would have slanted trajectories, colliding all the time and losing their energy very fast.
There are a few things that keep Saturn's rings roughly the way they are.
First, Saturn's D ring actually is "raining" down on Saturn currently. But, the phenomenon of shepherd moons prevents the vast majority of material from leaving the other rings: "The gravity of shepherd moons serves to maintain a sharply defined edge to the ring; material that drifts closer to the shepherd moon's orbit is either deflected back into the body of the ring, ejected from the system, or accreted onto the moon itself." (quote from Wikipedia)
Besides this, the majority of the particles within the ring system have almost no motion towards or away from Saturn; no motion towards the planet prevents them from being lost.
Second, Saturn's rings cannot clump into "full-fledged" moons, but they can clump into moonlets up to several hundred meters to a few kilometers across. At last count, I think there were over 200 that had been found, and they also come out of numerical simulations.
Beyond these larger moonlets, quasi-stable clumps and clusters of ring particles form with great frequency the farther you get from Saturn. These clusters of particles are constantly changing size, trading material, etc., and so there's no time for them to become solid and cohesive.
This gets into the idea of the Roche Limit and Hill Spheres. The basic idea of the Roche Limit is that the closer you are to a massive object, the more tidal forces are going to tear you apart (or prevent you from forming to begin with). Hill spheres are related, where the idea is at what point you're gravitationally bound to one object or another. If you're within Saturn's Hill sphere versus a moon's Hill sphere, you're going to be pulled to Saturn. With both concepts, you'll need to have a moon forming farther away from Saturn than its rings are now to actually be stable.
You can see the effects of these by looking at N-body dynamical simulations of the rings. This was my research for a year and a half, and it culminated in over a hundred simulations, many of which I made movies of, and then I posted them on one of my personal websites. If you go to it, scroll down and take a look at one of the C ring simulations, B ring simulations, and A ring simulations (warning - the movies are a bit big). You should choose ones with a large τ value and ρ of 0.85 because those will show clumping better.
What you'll see is that, in the C ring, almost no clumping occurs. Go farther from Saturn into the B ring and you'll see a spider web start to happen of strands of clumps of particles. Then if you go to the farther away A ring the strands are fragmented more into clusters. (Note on the movies: The "L" value next to each one is how large the simulation cell is on a side, in meters. So you're just looking at a VERY small region of the ring. It's set so that the center of the cell doesn't move, so you'd imagine that whole thing orbiting around Saturn.)
Best Answer
Great question.
If Earth had rings, and they had been there as long as the moon has, they would mostly likely line parallel to Earth's equator and be visible in the sky from an east to west orientation.
So how would Earth acquire a ring? Our moon is, in reality, slowly moving away from the Earth, but if it were instead moving inwards, eventually it would break apart due to differential gravitational forces between the side nearest us and the far side, 3000 km away. Obviously, a large amount of the moon will bombard the Earth, but this answer assumes we survive.
View of ring from Washington.
The Roche Limit can be viewed as an Earth shaped imaginary "border", on average 9,492 km from the centre of Earth, 1.49 times Earth's radius, for rigid bodies. So around the equator it "moves" outwards a little. It follows the oblate spheroid shape of Earth.
Earth may have had a ring just after its formation. The view of these ring from Earth would vary. It would all depend on your latitude and which direction you were facing. Near the equator, the ring would be like thin slices of light that erupted from distant Earth horizons and stretched into the sky as far as the eye could see.
The pictures assume the ring around Earth would be in the same proportion as the ring around Saturn is to that planet.
View of ring from the equator.
Why does the ring form around the equator as opposed to another axis. It's due to the effect of the Central Force Law, the same basic reason the planets are situated in a plane around the Sun. The Sun is spherical, so objects such as Pluto can "get away" with being 8 degrees out of line. If the Earth, and Saturn) were perfect spheres, then the axis of the ring could be at any angle. Because both planets are oblate spheroid, with a tidal bulge, over time the particles composing the ring would collect there. Saturn's rings have an estimated local thickness of as little as 10 metres and as much as 1 kilometer, so they are extemely "thin".
View of rings from the mid latitudes.
View of rings at 23° south latitude a 180° panorama gives an idea of what a magnificent sight the rings would be. The Earth itself is casting the shadow.
Image source: If Earth Had a Ring Like Saturn