Martin Jutzi and Adrien Leleu, both members of the NCCR PlanetS, took the challenge of calculating the formation process of the small inner moons of Saturn. The first, simple tests worked well. "But then, we took the tidal forces into consideration and the problems piled up," remembers Adrien Leleu. "The conditions close to Saturn are very special," confirms Martin Jutzi. Since Saturn has 95 times more mass than Earth and the inner moons orbit the planet at a distance of less than half the distance between Earth and Moon, the tides are enormous and pull almost everything apart. Therefore, Saturn's inner moons couldn't have formed with these peculiar shapes by gradual accretion of material around a single core. An alternative model called pyramidal regime suggests that these moons were formed by a series of mergers of similar sized little moonlets.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-05-history-saturn-small-moons.html#jCp
Take away is that sometimes astronomical bodies are formed
by merger in special situations (Saturn tides).
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