Rings of Uranus - Proposed model is unworkable

A model of Uranus's rings proposed by Van Flandern (1979) is discussed. According to the proposed model, Uranus's rings are the gaseous tails of unobserved small satellites. The hypothesis raises a number of objections, e.g., a gaseous torus must have a minor diameter of thousands, not tens, of kilometers; very large densities are required to produce the postulated angles of refraction; and making up the mass losses, even with a generous lifetime, would use up quite a large body in a few million years.