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The origin of rings around giant planets remains elusive. Saturn's rings aremassive and made of 90-95% of water ice. In contrast, the much less massiverings of Uranus and Neptune are dark and likely to have higher rock fraction.Here we investigate, for the first time, the tidal disruption of a passingobject, including the subsequent formation of planetary rings. First, weperform SPH simulations of the tidal destruction of big differentiated objects($M_{\rm body}=10^{21-23}$) that experience close encounters with Saturn orUranus. We find that about $0.1-10$% of the mass of the passing body isgravitationally captured around the planet. However, these fragments areinitially big chunks and have highly eccentric orbits around the planet. Then,we perform N-body simulations including the planet's oblateness, starting withdata obtained from the SPH simulations. Our N-body simulations show that thechunks are tidally destroyed during their next several orbits. Their individualorbits then start to precess incoherently around the planet's equator, whichenhances their encounter velocities on longer-term evolution, resulting in moredestructive impacts. These collisions would damp their eccentricities resultingin a progressive collapse of the debris cloud into a thin equatorial andlow-eccentricity ring. These high energy impacts are expected to becatastrophic enough to produce small particles. Our numerical results also showthat the mass of formed rings is large enough to explain current ringsincluding inner regular satellites around Saturn and Uranus. In the case ofUranus, a body can go deeper inside the planet's Roche limit resulting in amore efficient capture of rocky material compared to Saturn's case in whichmostly ice is captured. Thus, our results can naturally explain thecompositional difference between the rings of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Ring Formation around Giant Planets by Tidal Disruption of a Single Passing Large Kuiper Belt Object