Dying moon may give Mars a ring
This month, scientists announced that Phobos — one of Mars’ two moons — is probably falling apart.
The planet’s gravitational pull is causing the moon to shrink and stretch, and one day (as soon as 20 million years from now) the tug-ofwar might end in Phobos’ total annihilation.
But instead of ending their long, tumultuous relationship for good, this dramatic destruction may take Phobos and Mars to the next level: Phobos might just put a ring on it.
According to research published yesterday in and led by Benjamin Black and Tushar Mittal of the University of California at Berkeley, Phobos could form Martian rings that last for 1 million to 100 million years. These rings will form quite quickly once the moon starts to crumble in earnest, according to these new predictions.
Errant moons have made rings around their planets before. In Saturn’s case, it’s likely that frequent collisions between its moons (there are 62 today, and there probably used to be more) and other space rocks created the necessary materials. Mars just has poor Phobos to work with, so the mass of its rings will be much smaller than those surrounding Saturn.
But for a while, the rocky remains of Phobos will be so tightly packed around Mars that they’ll have about the same density as Saturn’s rings.
Let’s pause for a second to imagine Mars with a ring. Mars with a ring. What would that even look like?
We already know Mars has evolved a lot in the past few billion years: It started out as a wet, warm planet, but our sun’s violent stripping of its atmosphere has left it cold and barren.
Mars is a planet we generally think of as dead — with its atmosphere basically gone and slipping away more every day, it’s not going to suddenly become more suitable for life. But the new findings about Phobos are a reminder that not all planetary evolution has to revolve around increasing habitability. After aeons as a muddy red pile of rocks, Mars could still get a major makeover. And that’s really cool.
The researchers believe that this was probably a more common occurrence in the early days of our
solar system, and that Phobos is simply the last moon left on a death spiral toward its host planet. By observing its progress, we could learn more about how moons helped shape the planets we see today.
— Washington Post-Bloomberg The Muslim teenager arrested when a teacher mistook his homemade clock for a bomb threatened to sue his school and the town of Irving, Texas for US$15 million ($23 million), his lawyer said yesterday.
Ahmed Mohamed, 14, became an overnight sensation in September after his sister tweeted a photo of the aspiring inventor standing in handcuffs while wearing a T-shirt with the US space agency Nasa’s logo.
The son of Sudanese immigrants who lived in a Dallas suburb, he took the homemade clock to impress a teacher at MacArthur High School. Instead, he was accused of trying to scare people with a hoax bomb and escorted from the school in handcuffs.
His lawyers insist the school, police force and city officials violated Mohamed’s rights by wrongfully accusing and detaining him and then decided to “trash” him when the media got wind of the story.
His family moved to Qatar after Mohamed was offered a generous scholarship.
His attorneys are seeking US$5 million in damages from the school district and US$10 million from the city of Irving and said they will file a civil suit if they do not receive a reply within 60 days.