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Disturbances in the icy rings of Saturn have enabled scientists to gain a better insight into how moons are formed. 

Researchers in a recent study, reported that recently discovered disturbances at the very edge of Saturn's outer bright ring have resulted from a small icy object that formed within the ring. They believe that it may be in the process of migrating out of it. 

"We hadn't seen anything like this before," explained Professor Carl Murray from Queen Mary's Astronomy Unit, in the press release. "We may be looking at the act of birth, where this object is just leaving the rings and heading off to be a moon in its own right," he said.

Saturn's rings are a small-scale version of discs of ice and dust surrounding young stars. Researchers are interested in gaining more details regarding how moons form in Saturn's rings because these could also lead to a better understanding of how Earth and other planets may have formed and migrated within a disc around the sun.

"The theory holds that Saturn long ago had a much more massive ring system capable of giving birth to larger moons," added Professor Murray. "As the moons formed near the edge, they depleted the rings and evolved, so the ones that formed earliest are the largest and the farthest out. The mass of the ring system that produced them has been getting smaller with time."

Researchers believed that formation process might have ended at Saturn with rings too depleted to make more moons and that's why this discovery has generated more excitement once again, the press release added.  

Findings of the study will be published in the journal Icarus.