Why does Saturn have rings and Jupiter doesn't? A computer model may have figured it out

Jupiter, the fifth planet in our solar system and by far most massive, is a treasure trove of scientific discovery. RELATED: A giant planet may have "escaped" from our solar system, study finds With results that are currently online and will soon be published in the journal Planetary Science, researchers from the University of California–Riverside used modeling to determine that Jupiter's enormous moons nip the creation of possible rings right in the bud. Using a computer simulation that accounted for the orbits of each of Jupiter's four moons, astrophysicist Stephen Kane and graduate student Zhexing Li realized that those moons' gravity would alter the orbit of any ice that might come from a comet and ultimately prevent their accumulation in such a way as to form rings, as happened with Saturn. There are three faint rings, all of them made of dust particles emitted by the nearby moons — a main flattened ring that is 20 miles thick and 4,000 miles wide, an inner ring shaped like a donut that is more than 12,000 miles thick and a so-called "gossamer" ring that is actually comprised of three much smaller rings comprised of microscopic debris from the nearby moons. When the space probe Cassini finally got an up-close look at Saturn's rings, it found "spokes" longer than the diameter of Earth and potentially made of ice — as well as water jets from the Saturnian moon Enceladus, which would provide much of the material in the planet's E ring.