Saturn’s rings are arguably the most gorgeous and spectacular structures in the solar system. They’re so flat —  proportionally thinner than a single sheet of paper — that when they’re edge-on we can’t see them at all; if it weren’t for the fact that Saturn is tilted so we see them at an angle they’d be nearly invisible. A new paper just published posits that those two things are actually linked. A team of astronomers thinks that it’s possible that the reason Saturn’s rings exist and the planet itself is tilted may be due to the same phenomenon: The breakup of a large icy moon about a hundred million years ago [ link to paper ]. Saturn’s rotation axis — it’s north/south pole axis — is tipped with respect to its orbit by about 27°. That’s similar to Earth’s own tilt, properly called the obliquity , of about 23°. But that’s odd, because big gas giant planets should have an obliquity very close to 0.…