Key aspects of our current understanding of planetary rings are that rings are young and invariably found intermixed with small moons. These characteristics highlight the importance of random events in explaining their history and morphology.
Rings arise from singular events like the destruction of a ringmoon or comet.
A ring s physical nature is the result of a competition between fragmentation and accretion in the planet s Roche zone. These processes often involve occasional major events. Ring history is disorderly. These stochastic phenomena require long term observations to see individual events and to track the system responses.