I Slowed Down Saturn's Rings... Then STOPPED Them

Saturn's rings stay up for one reason: speed. Every chunk of ice is falling toward Saturn all the time, but it moves sideways so fast it keeps missing. So what happens if we take some of that speed away? We slowed every ring particle by 5%, then 10%, then 30%, and then stopped them completely, and followed every ring on its exact orbit. At 5% the rings start to "breathe" and blur, and only the faint D ring scrapes the clouds. At 10% the C ring swings low enough to hit and Saturn's equator starts to glow. At 30% every ring's path cuts through Saturn: the rings close like an iris and pour onto the equator at up to 29 km/s, a ring of fire 380,000 km long that at its peak puts out 18 million times more power than all the sunlight Saturn receives. Stopping the rings completely drops them all in about 2 hours... but with less energy than the 30% slowdown, because chunks that keep some sideways speed hit faster than chunks that simply fall. Real: Saturn's ring structure (Cassini measurements), the rings' mass (about 1.5 x 10^19 kg, Cassini Grand Finale 2017), "ring rain" (Cassini caught ring material falling into Saturn; the rings may be gone in a few hundred million years), Saturn's gravity. Computed: every ring after the slowdown follows its exact Kepler orbit; the impact speeds, times, energies and power come from those orbits. Invented or simplified: the slowdown itself (nothing could do it); collisions between ring particles and the pull of Saturn's moons are ignored during the fall; the glow of the burning equator is drawn from the computed impact power (its width and look are illustration). Simulated with SpaceSim. Music composed by me. CHAPTERS 0:00 Saturn's equator on fire 0:12 Saturn's rings today 0:57 What holds the rings up 1:22 5% slower 2:02 10% slower 2:47 30% slower 3:47 Stopped 4:47 The ranking 5:37 What next? TAGS saturn, saturn rings, what if saturn's rings stopped, ring rain, saturn rings falling, orbital mechanics, space simulation, spacesim, univ