"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch," as Carl Sagan once said, "you must first invent the universe." And if you wish to make a moon from scratch, according to new research, you must first create planets with rings (after inventing the universe, of course).

Earth’s moon may have emerged from a long-vanished ring system, much like the rings still encircling Saturn – and the same goes for many of the satellites orbiting the other planets. The bulk of the solar system’s regular satellites—those moons that stick close to their planets in roughly equatorial orbits—formed this way, rather than taking shape simultaneously with the planets as a direct result of planet formation, French astrophysicists have concluded. The researchers reported their findings in the November 30 issue of Science.

“It’s fundamentally the same process that gave birth to the moon and to the satellites of the giant planets, and that’s the spreading of rings,” says astrophysicist Aurélien Crida of the University of Nice–Sophia Antipolis and the Observatory of Côte d’Azur in France, who co-authored the study with Sébastien Charnoz of the University of Paris–Diderot.

Through theoretical modeling, the researchers found that the moon-formation action begins at the edge of a planetary ring, where a satellite can take shape without being shredded by the gravitational pull of the planet. There, moonlets coagulate from the ring material before migrating outward. As the ring system spits out moonlet after moonlet, the small objects merge to form larger moons, which may merge in turn as they spiral outward from the planet.

The idea of a moonlet assembly line differs from the standard conception of satellite birth, in which moons condense along with their host planet from a swirling cloud of dust and gas, much like the planets themselves are thought to have taken shape around the nascent sun. The solar-system-in-miniature concept seems to work well for the largest moons, such as Jupiter’s four so-called Galilean satellites, but the retinue of smaller moons circling the other giant planets “have so far been considered a by-product,” Crida says.

The new hypothesis seems to explain a key commonality among the regular satellites of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – namely, that moons farther from their respective planets tend to have larger masses than their closer-in neighbors. Like a snowball rolling downhill, the coalescing moons would grow larger and larger as they drift farther from the planet and its rings, undergoing progressively more mergers along the way. The end result is a neatly ordered satellite system, with small moons on the inside built from few moonlets and large moons farther out built from numerous moonlets.

“I think the best thing about this work is that they explain this link between the mass of the moon and the orbital distance, which was known before but not understood,” says planetary scientist David Nesvorny of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who did not contribute to the new research. “If you had asked me a few years ago, I would think of our moon’s formation and the formation of the satellites of the outer planets differently,” he adds. “This theory puts things on common ground.”

6 Comments

1. 1. jtdwyer 07:02 PM 11/29/12

   "Like a snowball rolling downhill, the coalescing moons would grow larger and larger as they drift farther from the planet and its rings, undergoing progressively more mergers along the way."
   
   I suspect that the more precise explanation would be that the collisions reduce orbital velocity, causing orbital distance to increase. I don't think there's any direct causal relation between orbital mass and orbital distance. Perhaps this is the "missing link" referred to - I also didn't find any link (pun intended) to a research report...

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2. 2. r2vettes 07:33 PM 11/29/12

   I absolutely can not believe what I have just read. Did the French just wake from a very long sleep? What happened to the Theia impact theory that has recently been supported by new evidence?
   Um....Duh! Closer moons=smaller. Could it be that the gravity of the host planets took moon forming material?
   

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3. 3. diducthat 07:23 AM 11/30/12

   Roche's Limit places bounds on how close large objects such as moons can get close to other large objects like planets. Tidal forces destroy large objects inside this limit.
   
   As tidal forces fall of as the inverse-cube of the distance from the host, one can readily see that the inside of the ring would provide an unstable environment for the birth of large objects.
   
   The relationship between size and distance then seems to make sense.

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4. 4. jtdwyer in reply to diducthat 07:59 AM 11/30/12

   I agree that the statistical relationship between mass and distance makes sense, due to the destructive influence of tidal forces.
   
   I'm suggesting that increasing the mass of an orbital would not introduce any dynamic factor that would cause the object to increase its orbital distance. I suggest that reducing orbital (rotational) velocity (via impact) would cause the orbital distance to increase.

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5. 5. Quinn the Eskimo 12:45 AM 12/6/12

   Of course, when the supportive photos state; "Artists conception..."
   
   They're makin' stuff up. Yup! And Wylie Coyote is CEO of Acme Mfg. now.

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6. 6. imbalzanog 09:25 AM 12/7/12

   The logarithmic dependence of the mass of the planets from solar distances was published from few time! SEE:
   http://www.lulu.com/shop/giovanni-imbalzano/perturbazioni-sismiche-legge-di-bode-e-interazioni-wimp/paperback/product-20546074.html;jsessionid=ED60C490060ED27BDF337D30C548C749

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