Planets/Rings question

[BeBMan]

Pls. look at the pic, I hope it's clear what this is meant to be - do planets with such multiple ring systems exist or are they at least possible?

I mean Saturn has only one ring system...I saw something like this in scifi art and wondered if there's a real basis for that.

[Lorizael]

We're probably not going to find anything like that. In general, ring systems are always aligned with the equatorial plane of the planet, because any other alignment will quickly cause the dust of the rings to start diverging into wildly different orbits (through precession) that destabilize the whole thing. So for one, only one of those ring systems will be stable, and two, interaction between those two different ring systems (even if they were somehow independently stable) would mess things up.

I'll note that Saturn technically has two ring systems, the main one we see which lies along Saturn's equator and a much larger, mostly invisible one (the Phoebe ring) that lies mostly in the plane of Saturn's orbit. But this ring is mostly associated with the planet Phoebe and doesn't really behave like a typical ring system (as see around the other gas/ice giants). It probably avoids destabilization from precession by being very far away and thin.

[BeBMan]

Thanks Though it would look cool (and did in that scifi pic I saw), but hey, can't have everything...

[Berzerker]

dont know how long it would last but I imagine a planet like Saturn with one ring system could acquire a 2nd or even a 3rd via collisions.

researchers are still debating the age of Saturn's rings, I suspect they were created around the time of the late heavy bombardment