The gas giants of the Solar System are adorned with trappings that the Earth does not have:rings. These large annular structures around Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune delight astronomers and sky watchers as the spectacle they offer is striking. What if the Earth had also inherited rings similar to those of Saturn? What would our terrestrial sky look like under these immense structures? A renowned illustrator decided to answer this question once and for all.
What could the Earth crowned with rings look like? Space and science fiction illustrator Ron Miller has created images of what the sky might look like if Earth had rings of the same proportion, relative to our planet, as those of Saturn. For his illustrations, Miller consulted several astrophysicists in order to obtain the most realistic rendering possible.
The most stable place for rings is around a planet's equator, so the appearance of rings varies with latitude. For example, near the equator in Quito, Ecuador, you would see the rings from the inside edge, so they would look like a thin line rising straight up from the horizon.
By comparison, near the Arctic Circle, the rings might look like a bump on the horizon:
At more temperate latitudes, the rings would look like a giant arch, crossing the sky from one end to the other:
These twinkling rings would neither rise nor set and would always appear in exactly the same place in the sky. These cosmic landmarks would be visible day and night.
The imaginary rings of Earth would differ in one key way from those of Saturn; they would have no ice cream. Earth is much closer to the Sun than Saturn, so radiation from our star would cause any ice in Earth's rings to sublimate. Yet even if Earth's rings were made of rock, that might not mean they would look dark.
Most moon rock is gray, and the Moon only reflects about 12% of the light that hits it. But the full moon "looks really bright because there's a lot of light shining on it, and because it's really close to us," says Caleb Scharf, an astrobiologist at Columbia University.
How bright would Earth's rings be? “About 1300 watts of light output per square meter reach the top of the Earth’s atmosphere. If the rings reflected even 10% of that, we're talking about every square meter reflecting as much light as that produced by a 130 watt bulb .
How far would the rings be from Earth? The minimum distance they could be at would be somewhere above the atmospheric layer known as the thermosphere, which reaches up to 1,000 km, according to the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research . Thus, commercial aircraft, which usually fly up to 11 km altitude, would not encounter any problems. If the rings were too low, they would fall apart in the atmosphere as shooting stars.
How far could the rings extend? Any object orbiting within a certain distance from Earth, known as its Roche limit, would break apart due to the force of Earth's gravity. Once broken, these objects would rejoin the rocky ring. For example, any Moon-sized object falling within 11,850 km of Earth's surface would disintegrate, forming a ring around the planet. Overall, Earth's outer rings would likely orbit even closer to our planet than Earth's Moon.
