Saturn's rings are one of the jewels of the Solar System, but it seems that their time is short and their existence fleeting.
suggests the rings are between 400 million and 100 million years old – a fraction of the age of the Solar System. This means we are just lucky to be living in an age when the giant planet has its magnificent rings. Research also reveals that they could be gone in another 100 million years.
The rings are visible to anyone with a decent pair of binoculars or a modest back garden telescope. Cast white against the pale yellow orb of Saturn, the rings are composed almost entirely of billions of particles of water ice, which shine by scattering sunlight.Amid this icy material are deposits of darker, dusty stuff. In space science,"dust" usually refers toof rocky, metallic, or carbon-rich material that is noticeably darker than ice.
Cassini-Huygens was a robotic spacecraft launched in 1997. It reached Saturn in 2004 and entered orbit around the planet, where it stayed until the end of the mission in 2017. One of the instruments aboard was theUsing data from the CDA, the authors in the new paper compared the current dust counts in space around Saturn with the estimated mass of dark dusty material in the rings. They found that the rings are no older than 400 million years and may be as young as 100 million years.
. Mimas is made of water-ice, just like the rings, so it's possible that the rings were formed from just such a cataclysmic impact.However they formed, the future of Saturn's rings is in little doubt. The impact of the dust grains against the icy particles happens at very high velocities, leading to tiny fragments of ice and dust getting chipped away from their parent particles.
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