I get the explanation that they have gravity and things are attracted, but why is it in a ring rather than a sphere? why do things from one AXIS get attracted but not from other?
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There’s only a couple of comments so far that actually attempt to answer your question (not only have some people answered the wrong question, they even got the answer to the wrong question wrong), so I’ll weigh in with a short answer:
Angular momentum.
When you’ve lots of stuff spinning around in a big cloud, you can look at the momentum of each particle and sum it all up, you end up with a direction for this total angular momentum. As particles in the cloud collide, their velocities perpendicular to this plane of total angular momentum tend to get cancelled out. The total angular momentum must be conserved though, and so you end up with a spinning disk.
This is the same reason why the planets are roughly on the same plane, why planetary disks (eg Jupiter’s rings) are a ring, and why galaxies tend to be flat. https://youtu.be/tmNXKqeUtJM
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