Contra-Rotating Planetary Rings or Bug?

[Itsumo]

I've been playing for a few months now and am currently out in the middle of no where exploring. I happened across a gas giant with an odd planetary ring system. I dropped into one set of rings close to the edge and the adjacent ring which was of a different colour I realized after approaching it was passing by quite quickly. My first thought was that I had happened across some amazing life phenomena which I hadn't come across yet in my reading or other people's YouTube videos but then I realized it was in fact rocks in the ring system.

The video of course looks best at 1080p because YouTube compression at other quality levels munges the capture up and you can barely tell anything is moving at all. I tried to skip over most of the video to about 2:30 where the best view begins but the link apparently erases that.

[video=youtube_share;iDsoSG9ScsM?t=139]https://youtu.be/iDsoSG9ScsM?t=139[/video]

I also went out skimming just over the ring that appears to be at super-cruise and it seems that the asteroids right around the ship blink out of existence (if you view from inside or overhead) until they are past the ship at a similar distance. Sorry this video is just as dark as the first - Win10 Game DVR as I haven't setup ShadowPlay yet. You'll notice the big asteroid below the super-cruise ring. I didn't attempt to go through them at all.

[video=youtube_share;CvbmSMIBfr0]https://youtu.be/CvbmSMIBfr0[/video]

So are there contra-rotating rings or have I stumbled across a bug?

 

[Aashenfox]

Triton features a retrograde orbit around Neptune in our own solar system. It's unusual, we assume, but not rare, for bodies to orbit retrograde, and since rings are often made up of ground up bodies, I guess them too?

 

[EDanaII]

Triton features a retrograde orbit around Neptune in our own solar system. It's unusual, we assume, but not rare, for bodies to orbit retrograde, and since rings are often made up of ground up bodies, I guess them too?

Rings are moons that came to close to the planet's Roche limit and were torn apart by gravitational forces. There's no reason why a retrograde moon couldn't suffer the same fate.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

The ring systems in Elite Dangerous are slightly simplified from real-life ones ... you can call this a bug, or you can call it a concession to running the game on something smaller than a super-computing cluster. And it's only really noticeable when you're on the boundary between the two systems.

In a real-life ring, the rocks on the inside of the ring will be orbiting faster than the rocks on the outside of the ring, and take less time to go around the planet. In Elite Dangerous, every rock in the ring has the same angular velocity, so the ones on the outside go faster in linear space. This means that the rocks in the ring don't move relative to each other, the hotspots don't get smeared out of existence in just a few days, they don't have to handle inter-asteroid collision detection for a few million objects in visual range, etc.

This means that if a planet has two rings, viewed from the perspective of one, the other ring will appear to be moving at great speed, as the average rotation speeds of each ring are very different. In real life, if you were in that position, the speed changes would be gradual, and while you would notice rocks moving relative to you, this would happen wherever you were in the ring.

If you go to supercruise and drop into the other ring, and then watch your position relative to the planet and the star, you'll almost certainly find that both rings are rotating in the same direction relative to the planet. However, from the perspective of the reference frame of one of the faster of the rings, the slower ring will appear to be rotating retrograde - in the same way that Mars or Jupiter moves retrograde in the sky as the Earth "overtakes" them.