Earth with rings

[ffutures]

Spotted by ps238principal

Absolutely beautiful little simulation - what would the Earth be like if it had rings?

Watch on YouTube

Comments

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Very pretty, I know what I want for Christmas....

[mymatedave.livejournal.com]

Thanks very much for posting this. Very cool and very pretty.

[molly-brown.livejournal.com]

Absolutely gorgeous! Thanks for posting.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Great fun, but there is more work to be done.

The Cassini division, and the other radial features, would not be where they are, unless you gave the Earth a flock of moons in suitable places.

The effect of a really big moon we already have, at a large inclination to the Earth's equator, would make the ring structure considerably different.

(I suppose, if one thinks about this hard enough, one eventually runs into the reason Earth doesn't have a ring, which offhand I can't remember just now, and spoils the entire what-if. Perhaps it's better if I shut up.)

Our Moon really did evolve from a ring of material around the Earth, which must have been a spectacular sight. It's a shame we were all born too late to see this.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I knew it wasn't really that simple, but the video is so gorgeous I wasn't going to let that get in the way...

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

You are right, I hasten to add.

[ponderoid.livejournal.com]

The reason we can't have a ring is that the moon would destabilize it. Even without our moon, a ring isn't likely, because we're too close to the sun for the ice, the typical ring material, to remain in the vicinity. The sun would sublimate it and then the solar wind would blow it away.

The video is quite neat, but the creator missed a couple easy things that I wanted to see: How the Earth's shadow on the ring would look from the surface around midnight, and views of the sun shining through the ring. How much light would it block? would there be any kind of rainbow/halo effects?

*** Ponder

[lapswood.livejournal.com]

I'd wondered exactly this since I was a teenager. Thanks for posting.
Have you seen any vids showing what it might be like if Earth was a moon around a gas giant planet. Like Jupiter may appear from Ganymede using similar artist imprssions?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

It's actually not quite so dramatic, Jupiter would be big in the sky, about 8 degrees across (the sun and moon are about 0.5 degrees wide from Earth), but we'd be in the plane of Jupiter's rings and they'd be more or less invisible. Here's a couple I made earlier for my RPG

Europa
(http://pics.livejournal.com/ffutures/pic/0006wpg0/)

Ganymede
(http://pics.livejournal.com/ffutures/pic/0007316d/)