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How do planets get rings?

Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

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What Are the Origins of the Rings?

The planets are all roughly in the same plane, because they have the same spin from the original blob of gas and dust that formed our solar system. And so that's already a clue that tells you something about the origins of these rings. But then if you have something smashed into a planet, release all this debris, and it starts orbiting the planet, it doesn't need to spin at the same rate as the planet spins. It might give you a different kind of distribution.

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