Planetary rings
Planetary rings
This is a simple image made in Blender showing a ringed planet during the summer solstice. I have stats for the yinrih's homeworld of Yih, density, radius, etc. I used the equation found on the Wikipedia article for Roche limit to determine the dimensions of the ring for this image using the following numbers.
Radius of Yih: 6.44e6 m Density of Yih: 4810 kg/m3 Density of object to be ringified: 3344 kg/m3 (I used Earth's moon)
Plugging and chugging gives us a Roche limit of 9.16e6 meters, or 1.42 Yih radii.
I assumed the Roche limit itself represented the outer radius of the ring, and that the inner radius was more or less arbitrary, which I set to about 1.14 radii.
This gives us a ring that's a lot closer than I was imagining, which presents some lore problems. The ring in the image above would look like two glowing horns if one were on the night side in the mid-latitudes and not, as I envision, a partially eclipsed but still obvious arch shape.
It's already well established that the Bright Way uses a golden arch in lieu of a halo in religious art thanks to the ring, and the ring is popularly conceived of as a contiguous arch for at least part of the year, giving rise to phrases such as "chasing the end of the ring" meaning to go on a fool's errand.
If I wanted to keep using the assumptions listed earlier, the only way to change the outer radius of the ring is to increase the density of the doomed celestial body.
I can, of course, ignore this and just make it whatever I want. I'm already ignoring how ephemeral rings are on a geologic time scale. And I could be making mistakes even within the parameters I mentioned because I'm running on 5 hours of sleep 🤷♂️.