Saturn’s rings may soon disappear in astronomical terms, according to new research.
A new analysis of data captured by NASA’s Cassini mission, which orbited the planet between 2004 and 2017, has revealed new insights into when the seven rings formed and how long they last.
During the grand finale of Cassini, as the spacecraft completed its 22 orbits between Saturn and its rings, researchers noticed that the rings were losing many tons of mass per second, meaning they would only last a few hundred million years at most.
“We’ve shown that massive rings like Saturn don’t last very long,” said Paul Estrada, a research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and a co-author of the study, in a statement.
One could speculate that the relatively small rings around the ice and other gas giants of our solar system are remnants of rings that were once as large as Saturn’s scattered rings of Uranus.
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Saturn’s rings are mostly composed of ice but have some rocky dust from fragments of asteroids and micrometeorites that collided with the rings.
The research also found that the rings appeared long after Saturn’s initial formation, and were still forming when dinosaurs roamed Earth.
“Our inescapable conclusion is that Saturn’s rings must be relatively young by astronomical standards, only a few hundred million years,” said Richard Doresen, professor emeritus of astronomy at Indiana University Bloomington and lead author of the study, in a statement.
“If you look at Saturn’s satellite system, there are other clues that something interesting has happened there in the last hundreds of millions of years. If Saturn’s rings aren’t as old as the planet’s, that means something must have happened to create their amazing structures, and they are very interesting to study.” “.
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2023-05-29 21:17:44
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