Study reveals that Saturn’s rings are really youthful.

May 14, 2023 | 13:55:38

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Recent work led by physicist Sascha Kempf at the University of Colorado Boulder has offered the strongest evidence to date that Saturn’s rings are quite young. This discovery might offer an explanation for a problem that has confounded scientists for more than a century.

A study that will be released on May 12 in the journal Science Advances suggests that Saturn’s rings are about 400 million years old at most. Because of this, the rings are far more recent than Saturn, which is estimated to be about 4.5 billion years old.

CU Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) associate professor Kempf claims that “In a sense, we’ve gotten closure on a question that started with James Clerk Maxwell.”

The researchers studied dust, which might seem like an odd subject, in order to reach that conclusion.

According to Kempf, minute rocky particles flow virtually continuously across the solar system. On some planetary bodies, notably the ice that makes up Saturn’s rings, this flux may occasionally leave behind a thin layer of dust.

By examining how quickly this layer of dust accumulates, he and his coworkers set out to date Saturn’s rings in the new study. It’s similar to estimating the age of a house by running your finger along its surfaces.

Kempf advised, “Consider the rings like the carpet in your home.” “If you have a spotless carpet set up, all you have to do is a wait. Your carpet will become dust-covered. The rings work the same way.

The researchers laboriously examined dust specks floating around Saturn from 2004 to 2017 using a device on NASA’s defunct Cassini mission called the Cosmic Dust Analyzer. Only 163 of the 13 years’ worth of collection’s grains came from outside the planet’s immediate neighborhood. But that was sufficient. Their estimates indicate that Saturn’s rings have probably only been collecting dust for a few hundred million years.

In other words, the planet’s rings are brand-new phenomenon that appeared (and possibly even vanished) in a cosmic “blink of an eye.”

“We are somewhat aware of the age of the rings, but it doesn’t any of our additional issues,” Kempf stated. “We still don’t understand how these rings originally developed.”

Galileo through Cassini

For more than 400 years, these supposedly transparent rings have intrigued scientists. Galileo Galilei, an Italian astronomer, was the first to see the features via a telescope in 1610, although he had no idea what they were. The handles on a water jug are somewhat reminiscent of the rings in Galileo’s original drawings. Scientist from Scotland Maxwell came to the conclusion that Saturn’s rings couldn’t be solid and were instead made up of numerous fragments in the 1800s.

According to current knowledge, Saturn has seven rings that are made up of innumerable ice fragments, most of which are no larger than a pebble on Earth. This ice weighs around half its total weight.

as large as Mimas, the moon of Saturn, and extends about 175,000 miles from the planet’s surface.

According to Kempf, scientists believed that the rings likely originated at the same time as Saturn for the most of the 20th century.

The problem with such notion is that Saturn’s rings are immaculately clean. According to observations, these landforms are composed mostly of pure water ice—nearly 98% of their total volume—and very little stony material.

Kempf added, “It’s practically impossible to wind up with something so pure.

With Cassini, it was possible to determine the exact age of Saturn’s rings. The spacecraft initially arrived at Saturn in 2004 and continued to collect data until it deliberately crashed into the atmosphere of the planet in 2017. The instrument called the Cosmic Dust Analyzer similar to a bucket, it caught little pieces as they flew by.

For NASA’s future Europa Clipper mission, which is scheduled to launch in 2024, engineers and scientists at LASP devised and constructed a significantly more advanced dust analyzer.

The scientists calculated that this extraterrestrial dust would contribute less than a gram of dust per square foot each year to Saturn’s rings—a little amount, but enough to accumulate over time. The rings may possibly be young, according to earlier research that lacked precise measurements of dust accumulation.

a lucky break

The rings might be disappearing already. According to a recent NASA research, the ice is gradually falling onto the planet and could completely vanish in a subsequent one.

100,000,000,000 years.

According to Kempf, it almost appears too good to be true that these transient structures existed at a time when Galileo and the Cassini spacecraft could view them. This begs the question of how the rings evolved in the first place. One theory put forth by some scientists is that the planet’s gravity may have caused one of its moons to shatter, leading to the formation of Saturn’s rings.

He said, “If the rings are dynamic and transient, why are we seeing them now?” It’s too fortunate.

Saturn’s rings are estimated to be no older than 400 million years old according to research that will be published on May 12 in the journal Science Advances. As a result, the rings are significantly more recent than Saturn, which is thought to be roughly 4.5 billion years old.

According to Kempf, an associate professor in CU Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), “In a way, we’ve gotten closure on a question that started with James Clerk Maxwell.”

The researchers studied dust, which might seem like an odd subject, in order to reach that conclusion.

By examining how quickly this layer of dust accumulates, he and his coworkers set out to date Saturn’s rings in the new study. This process is similar to determining how old a house is by touching its surfaces with your finger.

Kempf advised, “Consider the rings like the carpet in your home.” “You just have to wait if you have a clean carpet spread out. Your carpet will become dust-covered. The rings work the same way.

In other words, the planet’s rings are, brand-new phenomena that exist (and possibly even vanish) in what would be considered a cosmic blink of an eye.

The rings’ estimated age is known, but Kempf claimed that this information doesn’t help with any of their other issues. “We still don’t understand how these rings originally developed.”