All articles tagged with #roche limit
A new arXiv study suggests Venus could have harbored a moon for up to about 1.7 billion years (if the moon was roughly half the mass of Earth's), while a moon twice as massive would last only ~30 million years before Venus’ gravity drags it into the Roche limit and tears it apart, implying a brief, moon-influenced phase in Venus’s early history that could relate to its potential habitability.
New Cassini-era measurements suggest Saturn’s rings are only tens to a few hundred million years old, far younger than the planet itself, meaning dinosaurs lived during a time when Saturn had no rings; the rings likely formed from a tidally disrupted icy body near Saturn’s Roche limit, though exact age remains debated and could lie anywhere in the tens of millions to a few hundred million-year range.
New research suggests Mars’s inner moon Phobos could break apart much sooner than the Roche limit due to its rubble-pile makeup and increasing tidal distortion. Initial surface shedding is predicted around 2.25 Mars radii, with larger fragmentation at about 2.15–2.13 RM, and instability near ~2.09 RM that could trigger breakup. Debris from these events may re-impinge on Phobos, accelerating destruction in a scenario called a sesquinary catastrophe. The MMX mission, launching in 2026, will study Phobos’s interior to refine these timelines.