Future stargazers may no longer be able to see through a telescope Saturn’s most iconic signature rings, which are mostly made up of crushed ice, according to new research.
NASA’s space probe Cassini orbited the giant gas planet between 2004 and 2017, CNN reported. A new analysis of data from the Cassini mission to Saturn has given new insight into how long Saturn’s rings have existed, and when they might disappear. Relevant research results have been shared in three studies published in May this year.
Scientists have long debated the age and origin of Saturn’s rings, which formed the solar system and its individual planets about 4.6 billion years ago. Some astronomers contend that Saturn’s bright, icy rings must be younger than expected because they haven’t been eroded or dimmed by interactions with meteoroids over billions of years.
Cassini data led to a new discovery. The new findings, published May 15 in the journal Icarus, support the theory that the rings appeared long after Saturn’s initial formation. Studies published in the journals Science Advances on May 12 and Icarus on May 15 came to similar conclusions.
“It was inevitable that we would conclude that by astronomical standards Looking at it, the rings of Saturn must be relatively young, only a few hundred million years old.”
According to researchers, Saturn’s seven rings may still have been forming when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
Saturn’s rings are roughly composed of crushed ice, with only a tiny fraction of rocky dust created in space by broken asteroid fragments and micrometeoroids. These debris, which resemble grains of sand, collide with particles in Saturn’s rings, creating floating debris that orbits the planet in rings.
The researchers were able to measure how much cosmic dust regularly travels through the solar system and accumulates on the icy rings. Over 13 years, Cassini’s barrel-shaped Cosmic Dust Analyzer was able to collect 163 dust grains from beyond the Saturn system orbiting the gas giant.
At the same time, as meteoroids infiltrate the rings, they rapidly push material in the innermost ring toward Saturn. Cassini observed that Saturn’s rings are losing many tons of mass every second, which means, in astronomical terms, that the rings are running out of time. The researchers estimate that Saturn’s rings will last only a few hundred million years at most.
Previous research has pointed out that Saturn’s rings may disappear within 100 million years.
“We have shown that giant planetary rings like Saturn’s rings are not Will last a long time.”
“We can speculate that the relatively small rings around other icy and gas giant planets in the solar system are the remnants of the once huge rings of planets like Saturn. As far as astronomy is concerned, perhaps in the near future, after the erosion of Saturn’s rings , they would look more like Uranus’ sparse rings.”
The faint rings around Neptune and Uranus were once larger and brighter like the rings of Saturn today, the researchers note.
