In the astronomy of the Solar System, Chrysalis is a hypothetical moon of Saturn, named in 2022 by scientists of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology using data from the Cassini–Huygens mission.
[1] The moon would have been torn apart by Saturn's tidal forces, somewhere between 200 and 100 million years ago.
[2] The origin of Saturn's rings from the destruction of a satellite has been previously proposed by other authors.
Its orbit around Saturn may have been degraded as a result of Titan's orbit expanding due to interactions of the Saturnian system with a resonance with Neptune, resulting in the increasing eccentricity of Chrysalis's orbit until being torn apart during a close encounter with Saturn by its parent planet's gravitational force.
[4] The hypothetical moon was named after the pupa stage of a butterfly, with the rings of Saturn representing its emergence from the chrysalis.