Move over, Saturn, Mars might get its very own rings

Scientists believe that eventually Mars will have rings like the planet Saturn. While scientists have known that Mars’ largest moon falls into the third category for decades, this new study paints a clearer picture of what this will look like. This ring would last for a few million years before gradually widening to the point that debris would begin reaching the top of Mars’ atmosphere, resulting in stunning meteor showers while larger chunks of debris would spiral inwards and impact the surface at a shallow-angle, carving out elliptical-shaped craters on the surface.

The red planet’s largest moon, Phobos, has an inward-moving orbit that is sending it on a destructive path toward Mars’ strong gravitational grasp. A potential Phobos-born ring around Mars would likely only exist for between one and one hundred million years before the majority of the particles were pulled down into the surface of the planet; think about the volume of stuff that must have once been swirling around Saturn, for us to still be able to find so much of it in a relatively stable orbit. But for anyone living on Mars tens of millions of years from now, the Phobos Ring will be a permanent fixture in the sky. Some time between 20 t0 40 million years from now, it will collide with the red planet and the rocky debris will make up Mars’ very own ring. After the satellite is torn to pieces, its fragments will fan out into a disk and 20 million years from now, Mars will become a ringed planet.

“If you were standing on the surface of Mars, you could grab a lawn chair and watch Phobos shearing out and spreading into a big circle”, Benjamin Black, one of the researchers, told Nature.

Tushar Mittal revealed by email that their great moment was when they found during the study that the various strength of Phobos could be calculated based on certain variables, and this included the integrity of fractured rocks, analog materials, topography of Phobos, and other factors which ultimately showed that Phobos would either disintegrate by itself or smash bodily into Mars. Neptune also pulls its moon Triton toward it, so it has the same fate as Phobos.

Just as the tug of the Earth on the Moon manifests as tides, Mars’ gravitational pull leaves telltale traces on Phobos-a series of fractures across the moon’s surface. When the galaxy was a lot younger, ring formation was a rather uncommon process and this is why Saturn’s condition, for instance, is a special one entirely. But new modeling by Hurford and colleagues supports the view that the grooves are more like “stretch marks” that occur when Phobos gets deformed by tidal forces. The ripped moonlet will form a ring that will last for many years. “Another thing that we plan to look at in the future is to look at those impact craters and see if we can figure out whether some of them were produced by inward evolving moons as evidence for moons that Mars might have had in the past”.

Mars isn’t going to get its ring tomorrow though.