Trending Science: Saturn’s rings are surprisingly young, scientists now say

It’s difficult to picture Saturn ringless. However, the most extensive ring system of any planet in the solar system wasn’t around for most of its existence.

Research published in the journal ‘Science’ confirms that the rings formed less than 100 million years ago or maybe as recently as 10 million years ago. That would make them even younger than the dinosaurs.

As part of a joint American and European mission, NASA’s Cassini probe made the discovery. It orbited Saturn for over a decade before plunging into the planet’s atmosphere in late 2017. Before disintegrating, it sent back data on the atmosphere and rings.

Instruments precisely measured the amount of material in Saturn’s rings enabling the team of scientists to finally determine exactly how massive the rings really are. After determining the mass of Saturn’s rings the team was able to calculate their age. To achieve this they compared the mass of the rings and the mass of the bright visible components. “Previous estimates of the age of Saturn’s rings required a lot of modelling and were far more uncertain. But we now have direct measurements that allows us to constrain the age very well” lead author Luciano Iess from Italy’s Sapienza University told the ‘BBC’.

The majestic rings of Saturn haven’t always been there

The age of Saturn’s rings has been hotly debated among the scientific community for many years. Some believe they formed together with the gas giant. Cassini’s data reveals that the rings are still mostly bright ice. This leads to the conclusion that they’re relatively young. If Saturn was born about 4.5 billion years ago, that means the rings have been around for only 1 % of its lifetime. The team also established that the planet’s rocky core is between 15 and 18 times Earth’s mass.

“These measurements were only possible because Cassini flew so close to the surface in its final hours” Burkhard Militzer study author and professor of Earth and planetary science at the University of California Berkeley told ‘CNN’. “It was a classic spectacular way to end the mission.”

To obtain the right measurements, the scientists had to explain the deep flowing winds in Saturn’s atmosphere. These flows resemble enormous clouds just under 10 000 km deep. The surface clouds at Saturn’s equator rotate 4 % faster than this deep layer. “The discovery of deeply rotating layers is a surprising revelation about the internal structure of the planet,” explained Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “The question is what causes the more rapidly rotating part of the atmosphere to go so deep and what does that tell us about Saturn’s interior.”

Is the age of Saturn’s famous rings coming to an end?

The news that the rings haven’t always surrounded the planet tells us that we shouldn’t take anything for granted. This is especially true of the spectacular rings now following a recent NASA study. According to a press release by the space agency Saturn’s rings are disappearing even faster than we thought. They will be completely gone in about 300 million years. Apparently nothing lasts forever.