all right now there's of course a little bit more that we need to talk about about Jupiter and Saturn and that's the thing that Saturn is most known for okay what is Saturn most known for you guys should know this one yes the rings the rings of Saturn here's a picture of the rings of Saturn this is not a very very good picture of the rings of Saturn and that's because this particular picture of the rings of Saturn is taken from Earth from within our atmosphere in our atmosphere is essentially the the molecules jiggle around so much that it disrupts our images of something this small but if you take a picture of Saturn from space it goes from this to this so this is an actual photograph of Saturn from space so you can see why we bother putting telescopes on satellites right so that's that this particular picture of Saturn was taken from much closer to Saturn it's not just taken from Earth orbit um oops getting a phone call shut that down why don't we even have my phone on sorry guys let me turn that off goodbye phone all right so let's talk about these rings okay is Saturn the only planet with rings no Jupiter also has rings actually all the jovian planets have rings but Jupiter Jupiter has rings but did you see rings on Jupiter on any of the pictures that I showed you guys did you just see rings here again here's a picture of Saturn and Jupiter next to each other see any rings on Jupiter no no we don't that doesn't mean it doesn't have rings it just means that the rings on Jupiter must be much harder to see than the rings on Saturn okay so keep that in mind we'll come back to that in a second but Jupiter and Saturn both have rings Jupiter's rings are just much more faint so let's look at these rings now let's think about these rings are these rings solid liquid or gas let's figure that out first to see if anybody knows this are these rings made of solid liquid or gas I see people are a lot more afraid to try on this question that's okay that's okay so these rings are solid okay they're solid the rings of all the planets are made of solid okay different planets have different solids but they're all solid okay that said could you get out and walk around on these rings is that like something you could walk on probably not that's correct I said I said probably not because it's definitely not okay you definitely can't walk around on them because even though they are solid don't mistake me I don't mean that that's one big solid piece okay that's not one large sigh it's not like a frisbee sitting around Saturn here okay it is solid but instead of being just one one big piece it's actually made of several pieces so if you zoomed in on those those rings you'd see it's not just one ring it's actually lots of rings and if you were able to zoom in enough you'd probably see something that starts to look like this okay this is not a photograph everything else I've showed you we're photographs but this is not a photograph we haven't gotten a camera close enough to get this close of a picture here so basically these rings are very very similar to an asteroid belt okay they're very similar to an asteroid belt like the Sun has but they're just around these planets instead that said what are they made out of if you look right here they're coloring these in the in this artist's rendition here they're coloring these a sort of shiny white color and this is supposed to represent the rings of Saturn can you figure out what they're trying to to say these rings are made out of on Saturn does it mean know what the rings of Saturn are made out of ice ice now there is rocky material in there but there is a lot of ice mixed into the rings of Jupiter and that's mostly water ice and dry ice the same kind of ices that we've been talking about and that is why the rings of Saturn are so easy to see why is making why is the Rings being made of ice important why does being made of ice make the rings of Saturn easy to see what is it about ice yes ice is highly reflective you guys are figuring it out essentially because ice is so shiny and reflective you can you can see the sunlight bouncing off of it a lot better okay all right so what does that imply about the rings of Jupiter if being made out of ice makes the rings of Saturn easy to see what could we probably guess about the rings of Jupiter not ice that is correct the rings of Jupiter do not have very much ice in them they're mainly made out of rock okay and rock is not as reflective so it's much harder to catch the sunlight bouncing off of the rings of Jupiter so if Jupiter's rings were made out of ice they would be a lot easier to see like Saturn's okay now here's the follow-up question why are Jupiter's rings not made out of ice what makes it hard to have ice and there's here's a hint it's something to do with where Jupiter is the 'sydney at the heat of the Sun melts ice and as some of you are saying uh Jupiter is closer to the Sun and so essentially a Jupiter Jupiter is just close enough to the Sun that sunlight tends to melt ice in space at that distance so if Jupiter had formed a little further out it could have had rings just like Saturn but because Jupiter formed too close to the Sun the heat of the Sun melts ice at that distance and you're left with just rock in the rings of Jupiter okay all right now we're almost done talking about these rings there's the last thing I want to talk about is is how come these planets get to have rings and earth doesn't get to have rings how come the terrestrial planets don't get to have rings don't answer that question yet I know some of you might be able to guess it but in order to answer that question let's talk real quick about how the Rings form and again my document cam I was going to draw a couple of pictures here but the document cam that I got from the school isn't working for me right now so we're gonna have to use our imagination here and I'll sort of use this picture of Saturn to help us out okay so imagine that this is Saturn right here and imagine that my fist is a moon okay does every part of Saturn or sorry just every part of this moon feel the same amount of gravity from that planet the answer is no I'll go ahead and say that one just didn't roll this along which part of this moon feels the most gravity from the planet which part of this moon feels the most gravity from that planet it's orbiting we've talked about this in a few videos yes the part that is closer to the planet so if the moon was right here let me move this up a little bit if the moon was right here and the planet is over there that means that because this side of the moon is closer to the planet than this side of the moon this side of the moon would feel more gravity than this side of the moon okay and if I took that moon and moved it closer to the planet the difference between one side and the other will increase and if this part of the moon is pulled stronger than this side of the moon it's gonna do something to the shape of this moon as this moon gets closer to the planet what's going to happen to the shape of this moon yeah it's gonna stretch out so the closer the moon gets to the planet the less perfectly round it will be and the more oval or egg-shaped it will be so if it's way out here it'll be more perfectly round if it's here it'll be stretched out a little bit so out here round here a little more egg-shaped here even more egg-shaped but our moons made of very stretchy material our moons very stretchy no no they're not they're made out of mostly rock and at this distance you start getting a lot of ice mixed into so rock and ice which are both not very stretchy you can stretch them a little bit but if you stretch them too much if you stretched a moon too much what would happen to it you guys can figure this out if it doesn't stretch it would break so if you got a moon too close to a planet like Jupiter or Saturn it would break into bits but as long as that material was already orbiting the planet then the bits the broken bits would continue to orbit the planet but those broken bits don't all have to orbit at the same speed so they can spread out so what could all of those broken bits form if you've got these broken bits orbiting close to the the planet yeah that's your rings okay so essentially there is a danger zone around every planet okay there's a danger zone around every planet we're outside of the danger zone you can the gravity of that planet is not pulling on that moon enough or on that material enough to keep it from forming a moon whereas inside the danger zone the differences in gravity from one side to the other to the other would tend to break those bits apart and not allow moons to form and make rings instead okay so I'm not necessarily saying that the Rings are entirely made out of broken moons some of the material of the Rings could have just been too close to them to the planet to ever form a moon but at least some of this material has probably been formed by moons that have gotten too close and have been ripped apart okay so there's a danger zone around every planet and there actually is a technical term for the edge of that danger zone it's called the Roche limit and that's a little bit of a weird word it's spelled our Oh see h-e-b Roche limit is the edge of the danger zone so that inside the Roche limit so over there so over here sorry inside the Roche limit you're going to form rings because of the gravity of the planet and outside the Roche limit you would tend to form moons because the gravity is not strong enough to rip the material apart okay so here is the next question here we go does every planet have the same size Roche limit no my question for you is what about a planet determines how big the Roche limit is what about a planet determines how big its danger zone is you guys are basically getting that getting it it's the mass of the planet which means it's the gravity right so the gravity of the planet the higher the gravity the bigger the danger zone and the bigger the mass of the planet the bigger the the gravity so which planet probably has the biggest danger zone out of any of these planets which planet has the biggest Roche limit Jupiter so yes if Jupiter had formed at the same distance as Saturn it would probably have rings that are even cooler than Saturn's but it's just in the wrong place to do it because it doesn't have that reflective ice that said let's put this all together can you figure out why Earth and the terrestrial planets don't have rings why does Earth and the other terrestrial planets not have rings yeah you guys are putting together all the parts because earth and the terrestrial planets have a much lower amount of mass than than the jovian planets that means that they have a much lower pull of gravity and that means that their Roche limits are very very small I believe that the Roche limit of the earth it's been a while since I've done this calculation so I might be a little off but I believe the Roche limit of the earth is inside of our atmosphere so if you try to form a ring inside of our atmosphere what would the atmosphere do to all of the bits that you are trying to make a ring with I think you guys are gonna get it yeah essentially the air resistance would cause them to to fall essentially they would they would probably break up in the atmosphere and fall so essentially the Roche limits on the trip of terrestrial planets are just too small to have rings okay one last picture I wanted to show you guys you probably have seen pictures of Jupiter that looked kind of like this but I did want to show you this picture of Saturn because it turns out these are the rings right here that you know about the rings of Saturn actually go out all the way to here so the rings of Saturn are much bigger than people actually know so the Roche limit on Saturn is actually even bigger than it actually looks they do would guess okay so yeah