Nov 23, 2015 02:21 PM EST By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

When Mars eventually destroys Phobos by stripping it down with gravitational forces, the red planet will form a ring of dust using the moon's remnants.

Published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the new study indicates Mars will go the way of Saturn in up to 40 million years, the time it could take for the Red Planet to rip apart its largest and innermost moon.

"Compared to Saturn's rings, we expect a future Martian ring to be much smaller and contain much less material," study co-author Benjamin Black, a geologist at the University of California - Berkeley, told Popular Science. "But because that material will be spread over a smaller ring area, we predict that the initial density of a ring formed from the breakup of Phobos could rival or exceed the density of Saturn's rings."

Earlier this months, NASA detailed how Mars' gravitational pull has already shown signs of wear and tear on Phobos' surface.

"The funny thing about the result is that it shows Phobos has a kind of mildly cohesive outer fabric," Erik Asphaug, of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University and a co-investigator on the previous research, said in a press release. "This makes sense when you think about powdery materials in microgravity, but it's quite non-intuitive."

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