Three studies published this May have revealed information about the timing of the appearance of Saturn’s rings and when they might disappear.
For many years, scientists have debated the age and origin of Saturn’s rings. Some argue that the rings are relatively “young” because they have not been eroded or darkened by impacts from meteoroids.
The data collected during the Cassini mission has reinforced this hypothesis. The spacecraft in the mission orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017.
Saturn’s Rings – (Image Credit: NASA).
According to researchers, the rings of this gas giant planet formed long after Saturn’s initial formation.
“Our definitive conclusion is that Saturn’s rings must be relatively young by astronomical standards, only a few hundred million years old“, said Professor Richard Durisen, one of the authors, in an interview with CNN.
These rings are believed to have been forming while dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.
Saturn’s rings mainly consist of ice, with a small proportion of rocky dust generated in space from collisions between asteroid fragments and micrometeoroids.
During 13 years of orbiting Saturn, Cassini’s instruments collected 163 dust particles from Saturn’s rings. Further analysis revealed that the rings are “remarkably clean.”
This “cleanliness” indicates that the rings have not been around long enough to accumulate significant cosmic dust. Cassini also observed that Saturn’s rings are losing several tons of mass every second.
This means that these rings will only last for a few hundred million more years. In astronomical terms, that’s not much time at all.
“At some point in the not-so-distant future, in astronomical terms, after Saturn’s rings have eroded, they will look more like the sparse rings of Uranus,” added Paul Estrada, a scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center.
One hypothesis being proposed is that the smaller rings around some planets in the solar system could be remnants of Saturn’s rings.
Future space missions to study some of Saturn’s moons are expected to provide more answers, such as the events that led to the formation of the rings, according to CNN.
