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You are here: Home / Science / How Did James Clerk Maxwell Determine the Composition of the Rings Around the Planet Saturn?

How Did James Clerk Maxwell Determine the Composition of the Rings Around the Planet Saturn?

February 10, 2020 by Karen Hill

One of the first questions James Clerk Maxwell tackled concerned the composition of Saturn’s rings.

Are they solid or composed of countless separate particles?

Maxwell first theorized that the rings could not be either uniformly solid or liquid because they would be unstable and would break up.

He used mathematics to indicate that the only possible way a ring would not collide with the surface of Saturn would be to have about 82 percent of its mass packed onto one side.

However, he said such a precise packing was highly unlikely since the rings had formed at random.

Maxwell concluded that the only possibility was that the rings were composed of a large number of small satellites, each orbiting Saturn independently.

The theory was finally confirmed after the Pioneer and Voyager spacecrafts took photos of the rings in the 1970s and 1980s.

Maxwell died when he was only 47.

He died at the same age and of the same disease, abdominal cancer, as his mother.

Related Facts

  • How Do Saturn's Planetary Rings Orbit Saturn and Which Of Saturn's Rings Revolve Around the Planet the Fastest?
  • What Are Saturn's Rings Made of and How Did the Rings Around the Planet Saturn Form?
  • How Large Are the Rings Around the Planet Saturn and How Far From the Surface of Saturn Do the Rings Extend?
  • Who Was James Clerk Maxwell and Why Was Maxwell's Work In Electromagnetism a Major Advancement In Physics?
  • Which Rings Around the Planet Saturn Are the Most Prominent and What Is the Biggest Ring Around Saturn Called?
  • How Many Rings Does Saturn Have and How Many of the Planetary Rings Around Saturn Have Been Identified?

Filed Under: Science

About Karen Hill

Karen Hill is a freelance writer, editor, and columnist. Born in New York, her work has appeared in the Examiner, Yahoo News, Buzzfeed, among others.

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