Diamagnetic expulsion as a possible cause of the origin and stability of saturn’s rings

To date, the origin and evolution of Saturn’s rings have not been consistently explained. There are several hypotheses concerning the origin of Saturn’s rings, which can be summarized as follows.1 (a) The ring particles can be collision-generated debris from current moons. (b) A satellite in the Roche Zone was destroyed by a passing comet. (c) A massive comet was tidally disrupted during a close passage by Saturn. (d) The rings are the remnants of Saturn’s protosatellite disk. Existing approaches to dynamics of Saturn’s rings2−6 postulate that ring particles orbit the planet close to its equatorial plane without giving a physical explanation of this peculiarity. Other theories explaining stability of the rings in the equatorial plane, for example, by the gravitational quadrupole moment of the planet,7 are in poor agreement with certain characteristics of the rings, e.g. with the particle size distribution.8