The most unique planet in our solar system has long been the subject of debate among scientists about its age, origin and luminosity angle.
Without its rings, Saturn looks really dull. Rather very monotonous. Once those sparkly bracelets around it are erased—as blogger Jason Kotke did in a NASA image (above)—it will become one of the dullest planets in our solar system. True, its poles have a hexagonal vortex and some spectacular whirlwinds, but its vanilla-white face lacks the sensuality of Jupiter’s sultry belts, Neptune’s atomic blue, or Venus’s suffocating dust. Even Mars’ rust red color looks more interesting than Saturn’s. Sometime back 4.5 billion years ago, fortunately, the universe gifted this neighboring planet something that makes it truly special. He placed around it a system of enormous brightly colored ice rings. But scientists don’t agree about when Saturn’s rings were formed, or how these sparkling bracelets arose around it. This has been the case for decades. Even today, the origin of one of the most distinctive features of the solar system remains an intractable mystery.
“Saturn was formed at a certain time during the formation of the solar system, and we do not know whether the rings were formed at the same time as the planet, or if they arose long after that,” says Mariam Al-Motamed, an astrophysicist at Cornell University in America. “The reason these rings are interesting is not to know when they formed, but to understand the system that governs Saturn. We have a planet, a ring system and a moon system, and we think there is a connection between the rings and the moons.” This puzzle is unique in its suspense. For the most part, scientists have a good knowledge of what causes the most amazing sights of our solar system, such as the rift carved in the face of Mars that the Grand Canyon appears in front of it like a dwarf; or that rippling “great red spot” on Jupiter’s surface; So is the moon’s massive south pole. As for Saturn’s rings..! “Saturn’s rings are unique,” says Jeff Causey of NASA’s Ames Research Center. “They’re the only big, massive rings, and they’re very bright, which is very unusual. So this has always been a mystery.” Scientists pondering a solution to this question often fall into two camps. The first camp suggests that Saturn’s rings are primordial, that is, they formed with Saturn more than four billion years ago, and that this planet was never a dull and cold world. As for the second camp, it is believed that the rings are much younger, that is, they were formed during the past hundreds of millions of years only. According to this theory, the rings are so young that if we assumed a space program for the dinosaurs, they might have seen Saturn without rings through their telescopes (and perhaps avoided their extinction by a stray asteroid).
“Both theories have strong arguments, but they also have weaknesses,” says Al-Motamed. Although these two origin stories differ in duration by billions of years, they do have one thing in common: violence. The formation of the rings required the catastrophic destruction of an icy body, which could be a comet or the moon. Somehow, this body was hovering near Saturn, and it was crushed by the planet’s gravity into countless ice fragments. A small part of these fragments is larger than houses; Others are very small. Most of these fragmentation rings consist of pure, shiny water ice, but one of these rings has a slightly darker color. Over time, these shattered fragments lined up into the ring system we see today, which stretches roughly 270,000 kilometers across and is only about 10 meters thick. The “old rings” camp says the catastrophe occurred in the early days of Saturn. (It is scientifically more likely that a stray object would enter the gravitational jaws of a planet during the solar system’s youth.) One version of that story suggests that the giant planets weren’t born as we see them today; Rather, it moved to its current locations and triggered a series of disturbances among the smaller bodies until they ended up scattered everywhere like heavenly snowballs. During the chaos that occurred at the birth of the solar system, it was not difficult for an icy body to end up in the form of rings around the planet Saturn. Ancient ring theory also predicts that some of Saturn’s moons formed from shattered rings that deviated far enough from the planet to form clumps of their own. As a result, some of the moons that today hover near the margins of the rings are composed of the same material as the rings. “Honestly, and without being too neutral, I think the old rings are more reasonable to me than the younger ones. This is my conviction so far, but I would be happy if someone convinced me otherwise,” says Al-Motamed. The problem is that icy rings shimmer so brightly white that they can’t be billions of years old, or at least that’s the argument the “younger rings” camp is making. This problem, called the pollution argument, depends on the rate at which dark dust in the outer solar system collides with its role in dimming the brilliance of the rings. Simply put, nearly four billion years of terrible cosmic rain should have made Saturn’s rings look as dark and unimpressive as Jupiter’s rings, unless they are massive or young. In 2017, scientists used NASA’s Cassini spacecraft to measure the mass of Saturn’s rings, and found that there wasn’t enough material to absorb the solar system’s dust and keep its shape in perfect condition. Cassini has also collected data on how much dust ends up in the Saturnian system. This finding also supported the notion that the rings are of recent origin.
However, it remains highly unlikely that a massive object would scatter into rings as it entered Saturn’s gravitational belt, except in the early solar system chaos scenario.
