The Moon may have once had rings, study indicates

No, it is not something from science fiction: it is possible that the Moon and other bodies of its condition have had rings at some point in their history.

A controversial study puts on the table the possibility that the Moon, our faithful companion in the Universe, once had rings. This proposal draws attention, not only because of what it represents, but also because it is something extraordinary, considering that no natural satellite in the Solar System has this feature today.

According to the study that presents this scenario, if rings had been created on moons in this part of the cosmos, they could remain stable for a million years, even being gravitationally attracted by other nearby objects.

The conclusions come from a research published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. In their exercise, the scientists took five sets of spherical moons and their neighboring planets. The simulations showed what would have happened if, for a million years, these planetary companions had rings.

What was expected was that the rings were unstable, but the model showed that they behaved in the opposite way. An example is our moon, which had a 95% chance of hosting a stable ring system.

“We didn’t expect moons in a hostile gravitational environment, with many other moons and planets perturbing their rings, to maintain stability,” Mario Sucerquia, lead author and astrophysicist at the French University of Grenoble Alpesa, told Live Science.

What happened to the rings?

If true, it’s not clear how those rings could have disappeared. Curiously, the authors of the work don’t think of gravitational factors, rather they think of solar radiation and charged particles from the planets’ magnetic fields.

All of this is, so far, a proposal. There are scientists who speak out against it. Either way, the possibility remains something that many of us didn’t imagine.