Accretion Models And Rings Options

[dvandorn]

I've read a lot of theories, most of them generated in the past 20 years or so, about how rings around the gas giants (and, at a larger scale, rings or clouds of small, unconsolidated bodies around stars) are formed. They seem pretty evenly divided between the idea that gravitational resonances broke apart larger bodies to create these rings, or that the same resonances have kept the ring bodies from accreting into larger bodies.

What is the current thinking on this issue? Is it the tear-em-down, the don't-let-em-accrete, or some steady-state combination of the two?

Just curious...

-the other Doug