A catastrophic event could have created Saturn's rings while the dinosaurs were still roaming Earth.
In Saturn's case, the precession is instigated mostly by Titan as the sun's gravity pulls on the moon, incurring a torque on Saturn. A torque is a twisting force, and in the case of Saturn, the torque is acting on Saturn's rotational axis, prompting it to precess.
At some point, as the frequency of Saturn's precession increased, it entered into a resonance with the precession of the node of's orbit, i.e. the location where Neptune's orbit cuts across the ecliptic plane. A resonance is an amplifying effect, such as the classic example of pushing a child on a swing. Push at just the right moment, and the amplitude of the swing can increase.
However, today the frequency of Saturn's precession and the precession of Neptune's orbit are not in resonance, but are just outside it, their frequencies not quite matching up. Could something have happened to move Saturn and Neptune out of resonance?"We propose that there used to be an additional satellite that was lost through a chaotic orbital instability, and had a close encounter with Saturn and formed the rings," said Wisdom, who christens the hypothetical moon 'Chrysalis'.
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