The Earth could very soon have its own rings like the planet Saturn.

In any case, this was predicted by Jake Abbott, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Utah (United States), in a recent interview with the

Salt Lake Tribune

.

The reason ?

A lot of space waste has been left in Earth orbit during the various shipments of objects in space organized since the launch of the Russian satellite Sputnik 1 in 1957,

Slate

reports

according to information from

Futurism.

“The Earth is about to have its own rings.

They will just be made of scrap, ”summarizes the professor.

Currently, according to the European Space Agency, 170 million space debris larger than one millimeter are already circulating in our sphere of attraction, including 670,000 less than three centimeters.

A figure which should only increase because of the more and more intensive use of Earth's orbit by various companies such as SpaceX.

Saturn's rings doomed to disappear

Beyond this “ring” effect, this large amount of space waste also increases the risk of collisions.

In an article published last October 20 in

Nature

, Jake Abbott and his teams thus proposed a solution to this problem: a robotic arm equipped at its end with a swirling magnet.

The role of this device would be to create eddies of electric currents which would be able to control the debris by reducing their speed in particular.

Conversely, the first two rings of Saturn, which in turn are composed of clusters of icy bodies of different sizes, could be led to disappear within 100 million years.

According to NASA, these rings are indeed threatened because of their proximity to the gravitational and magnetic fields of the planet.

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  • Science

  • Saturn

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  • Pollution

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