Saturn’s ring system may well have formed when dinosaurs were still walking on the Earth, and will last only another few hundred million years at most, according to two new studies published in the journal Icarus.
All of the giant planets of the Solar System have ring systems, the majority of which are relatively low mass and composed of ringlets, arcs or gossamer rings and whose characteristics indicate that they are spectrally dark and that water ice is essentially absent or not a dominant compositional constituent.
This is in stark contrast to the Saturnian rings which are relatively massive and composed of % water ice by mass.
That Saturn’s rings are so massive and icy is almost certainly a clue to their origin and age.
“Our inescapable conclusion is that Saturn’s rings must be relatively young by astronomical standards, just a few hundred million years old,” said Indiana University Professor Emeritus of Astronomy Richard Durisen.
“If you look at Saturn’s satellite system, there are other hints that something dramatic happened there in the last few hundred million years.”
Professor Durisen and his colleague, Dr. Paul Estrada of NASA’s Ames Research Center, have long argued that Saturn’s rings are relatively young.
However, it wasn’t until data was available from NASA’s Cassini mission — particularly its 2017 Grand Finale, consisting of 22 orbits passing between Saturn and its rings — that they were able to use theoretical models to determine the age and longevity of the rings with confidence by computing how the rings change over long periods of time.
Particularly important for their work were Cassini’s measurements of the meteoroid influx rate, the mass of the rings and the inflow rate of ring material onto Saturn.
The impact of meteoroids not only pollutes the rings, it ultimately leads to ring material drifting inward toward the planet.
The theoretical models presented by the authors demonstrate that the rings should be…
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