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Re: Saturn-like Ring Around the Earth

As a follow up to the news, as reported in the April issue of DISCOVER
magazine, of a possible ring of impact ejecta around the Earth at K-T
time--In the early 1980s, NASA's O'Keefe first calculated that bodies thrown
up from the Earth could not possibly reach a stable, geocentric orbit.  If
the orbit was hyperbolic, he calculated, the objects would not return and if
it was elliptical the ejecta would not even go around the Earth once!  Only
human-made satellites can be accelerated after reaching a suitable height.
So there appears no logical way this can happen in nature.  So if there
indeed was a Saturn-like ring around Earth as suggested, it could only have
been formed from extraterrestrial material arriving at the Earth, not from
terrestrial material "spashed" out of the atmosphere and into space.
O'Keefe, and now others, suggest such a ring (during K-T and Eocene times)
may have formed causing cooling of the Earth's surface in the ring's shadow,
etc.  But if these calculations are correct, and there's no reason to doubt
O'Keefe, curiously the
ring(s) seems not to have been composed of terrestrial ejecta.  The question
then is "of what was it composed?" -- Lou Varricchio

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