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According to the IAU's explicit count, there are eight planets in the Solar System; four terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) and four giant planets, which can be divided further into two gas giants (Jupiter and Saturn) and two ice giants (Uranus and Neptune). When excluding the Sun, the four giant planets account for more than ...
This structure is thought to arise, in several different ways, from the gravitational pull of Saturn's many moons. Some gaps are cleared out by the passage of tiny moonlets such as Pan , [ 48 ] many more of which may yet be discovered, and some ringlets seem to be maintained by the gravitational effects of small shepherd satellites (similar to ...
The examination of Saturn's gravitational moment, in combination with physical models of the interior, has allowed constraints to be placed on the mass of Saturn's core. In 2004, scientists estimated that the core must be 9–22 times the mass of Earth, [ 44 ] [ 45 ] which corresponds to a diameter of about 25,000 km (16,000 mi). [ 46 ]
Since, within the Roche limit, tidal forces overwhelm the gravitational forces that might otherwise hold the satellite together, no satellite can gravitationally coalesce out of smaller particles within that limit. Indeed, almost all known planetary rings are located within their Roche limit. (Notable exceptions are Saturn's E-Ring and Phoebe ring.
Figure 4: Saturn's rings are inside the orbits of its principal moons. Tidal forces oppose gravitational coalescence of the material in the rings to form moons. [11] In the case of an infinitesimally small elastic sphere, the effect of a tidal force is to distort the shape of the body without any change in volume.
Kepler's laws only account for the influence of the Sun's gravity upon an orbiting body, not the gravitational pulls of different bodies upon each other. On a human time scale, these perturbations can be accounted for using numerical models, [53]: 9-6 but the planetary system can change chaotically over billions of years. [54]
Gravitational field strength within the Earth Gravity field near the surface of the Earth – an object is shown accelerating toward the surface If the bodies in question have spatial extent (as opposed to being point masses), then the gravitational force between them is calculated by summing the contributions of the notional point masses that ...
They are probably fragments of larger bodies captured by Saturn's gravitational pull. [30] [31] In 2005, ... by the effects of Saturn's gravity. [53]