Space & the universe

Jupiter's rings are made of its own moons, slowly crumbling

Saturn gets the rings, but Jupiter has them too "faint, dusty, and continuously resupplied by its inner moons as micrometeorites blast material off their surfaces. Each component can be traced back to a specific parent moon: the gossamer rings are literally named for Amalthea and Thebe, whose debris they contain. The estimated total mass spans five orders of magnitude, and nobody knows whether the system is ancient or recent. There is also a possible ring near the moon Himalia that may be wreckage from a collision in geologically recent times.

The rings are so faint they went unnoticed until Voyager 1 flew past in 1979, and seeing them from the ground still requires the largest telescopes available.

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