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midtskogen
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How rings became WORSE

03 Dec 2021 05:32

What I'm saying is that there must be planets between gas giants and planets that wont have stable rings, and what would rings around those look like?
There are planets between gas and rocky but you can't have smth in between having or not having rings. They either exist or not. 
Yes, and my question was, do they, when they exist obviously, have textures different than Saturn's?  What educated guesses can we make?
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Arigato
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How rings became WORSE

03 Dec 2021 05:51

Man, they can't have different textures. This is all like dust or sand. Can sand have different textures in different deserts? You are talking not of a solid thing, you talking of a particles massive. The only variation - some planets may have rings of stones not ice (our giants have ice mostly), but for human eye this will look same. More or less transparent, wider or thinner but this will always look same. 
 
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How rings became WORSE

03 Dec 2021 09:05

Why do some people think that because a phenomenon is a temporary item that it does not belong in Space Engine? Everything, more or less, in the universe is temporary, some just exist longer than others. I would be very disappointed if all transitional and "fleeting" phenomena were removed from S.E.

Even the rings of Saturn are relatively new given the age of the Solar System, and are constantly falling into Saturn. A few hundred thousand years or so from now and they will be gone. A mere blink of the eye compared to the age of the Universe.
 
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Arigato
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How rings became WORSE

03 Dec 2021 09:52

So you want what? Just yet another simple rings above a simple planet but there is a sign "Look, this one is complex geoid and those rings are just for 10 years"?
 
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How rings became WORSE

03 Dec 2021 09:56

Me? Want? I'm not the one asking for anything new or even any changes to something that might exist at some point in time. The Universe is evolving, and in constant change. Why should we not see all the different stages in the evolution of a stellar system or planet at any given moment in time?
 
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Arigato
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How rings became WORSE

03 Dec 2021 12:56

I see you are very focused on some super unlikely short-term momentary events in space. Keep in mind that time in SE can be accelerated. And then if some event is very short we must see it developing. Otherwise there is NO point of momentary events if they work same static as all the others.
 
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midtskogen
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How rings became WORSE

03 Dec 2021 13:50

So you want what?
I wanted to know whether we should expect (reasonably stable) rings around rocky planets to have different textures than those around gas giants.  Is that really an unreasonable thing to ponder?  We don't really have much empirical data on this.
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Arigato
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How rings became WORSE

03 Dec 2021 15:21

They can't have different tex because it's not solid matter, it's dust. They can only be more transparent.
 
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How rings became WORSE

03 Dec 2021 15:48

What about a different albedo, then? Couldn't the texture be different since the albedo clearly changes with the rings composition?
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Mr. Abner
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How rings became WORSE

03 Dec 2021 19:17

I see you are very focused on some super unlikely short-term momentary events in space. Keep in mind that time in SE can be accelerated. And then if some event is very short we must see it developing. Otherwise there is NO point of momentary events if they work same static as all the others.
I don't wish to dwell or focus on momentary events, but for everything that is the way it is the Universe now, it was at one time different. And will likely be different again in the future.

And I rule out the ability to move the clock in S.E., as it does not show any movement nor evolution of any stars. In fact, the ability to move the clock in S.E. is really only (currently) useful for astronomically short time periods, such as planetary orbits and such.  I would love an S.E. with the ability to fast-forward the clock some 4 billion years and watch the Sun grow into a red giant. But I don't think that's going to happen for quite some time yet.
 
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How rings became WORSE

03 Dec 2021 20:21

Man, they can't have different textures. This is all like dust or sand. Can sand have different textures in different deserts?
Yes it can, both in the sense of texture as in the feel of the sand grains against your skin (depends on their size and roughness, which absolutely does vary), and in the sense of visually from afar (better to the analogy of how rings look from a distance where you can't see the individual particles.) The best analogy is to look at satellite images of dunes in different deserts. The wind can shape them up into very different forms, for example linear dunes vs. star-shaped ones. Similarly, the visual texture of rings depends on the perturbations they are subjected to, and you can get a sense of that from the Cassini images.
I wanted to know whether we should expect (reasonably stable) rings around rocky planets to have different textures than those around gas giants.  Is that really an unreasonable thing to ponder?  We don't really have much empirical data on this.
Quite so, and I don't have a very good intuition for it, myself. A good way to approach it would be through simulations, but to simulate that level of detail in the rings and with a nonuniform gravity field... probably too complicated for home computers.
 
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How rings became WORSE

04 Dec 2021 01:49

Me? Want? I'm not the one asking for anything new or even any changes to something that might exist at some point in time. The Universe is evolving, and in constant change. Why should we not see all the different stages in the evolution of a stellar system or planet at any given moment in time?
I've been asking for this for a long time, not only do I want to see stars evolve towards becoming giants, novae, supernovae, etc, but how about we also see the proper motion of stars?  I know this is doable since starry night does it and I'm fascinated by what our night sky will look like millions of years from now and how all the constellations will be different.  Simulating the big bang/big bounce/inflation and the expansion of the universe would also be awesome.
 
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midtskogen
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How rings became WORSE

04 Dec 2021 02:28

They can't have different tex because it's not solid matter, it's dust. They can only be more transparent.
Variation in transparency is the texture.
A good way to approach it would be through simulations, but to simulate that level of detail in the rings and with a nonuniform gravity field...
True, perhaps computers don't have a very good intuition for it, either.  Maybe sufficiently, though, to shed light on Arigato's point, that some planets can't have stable rings.  Space Engine assumes that many rocky planets have stable rings.  Science fiction assumes it.  My intuition says that it should not be too rare.  Saturn has many moons, which complicates the gravity like the geoid, weakly, though, but in another sense more complex since the gravity is shifting due to the orbital motion.  But it seems reasonable that a very messy geoid, as well as a very elliptical orbit close to the host star, would cause problems for a stable ring.

But for this there should be actual data from Kepler, though probably difficult to interpret.  A simple Google search gave me this paper: Systematic Search for Rings around Kepler Planet Candidates: Constraints on Ring Size and Occurrence Rate

Kepler planets have a bias towards short orbits, i.e. close to the star so planets subject to high tidal forces.  Is that a limiting factor?
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Mr. Abner
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How rings became WORSE

04 Dec 2021 11:43

Are any ring systems stable? Even Saturn is losing its rings, and they are not that old astronomically speaking.

S.E.'s clock does not model the evolution of the Universe (yet), just the orbits of the planets and satellites. So why not model some phenomena in some transitional phase. If there's a problem with some of these objects not being realistic it is perhaps S.E.'s reported age of the object, not that it exists at all.
 
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midtskogen
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How rings became WORSE

04 Dec 2021 16:27

Are any ring systems stable?
Nothing lasts forever.  Saturn's rings have been found to be many million years old, so for our purpose we can call them stable, though it might well be the case that Saturn has been ringless for most of its history.
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