Saturn’s Ravioli-Shaped ‘Ring Moons’
Saturn has around 60 moons, some of which are located either inside or next to its majestic ring system. Five of these ring moons, as they’re called, are exceptionally weird in terms of their physical appearance, featuring equatorial bulges. Some bulges are pronounced and amorphous, while others are more skirt-like in how they’re wrapped around the moons.
Recent research suggests these moons—none of which is wider than 12 miles (20 km) across—formed from the same giant impact that spawned Saturn’s rings.
“The moons are giant shards left over from the impact,” Bonnie Buratti, an astronomer from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology, told Gizmodo in March of 2019. “The ‘skirts’ around their equators are particles from the rings that continue to accrete. The way the moons scoop out particles in their path could be a smaller example of how planets form from smaller particles.”
