Take a Good Look at Saturn Before it ’s Too Late, Because it’s Losing its Rings

It ain’t St. Louis without the Gateway Arch, it ain’t Mount Rushmore without the Presidents, and it sure ain’t Saturn without the rings. That, at least, is how it’s always seemed—but things are apparently changing. According to a new study published in the journal Icarus, Saturn could be largely ringless in as little as 100 million years. Among astronomers, the smart betting has never been that Saturn’s rings would live forever. The diameter of the ring system is huge: 170,000 miles, or almost three-quarters of the distance from the Earth to the moon. But it’s also as little as 30 feet thick. The rings are made of billions of particles of ice and rock, some boulder-sized, but others microscopically tiny. In the dynamic, high-energy environment of Saturn, it was always a question whether so diaphanous a structure could survive. And as long ago as 1980 and 1981, when Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 reconnoitered Saturn, the evidence began suggesting that the answer was no. Those spacecraft observed suspicious variations in both the electrical charge in Saturn’s ionosphere and the thickness of its rings, as well as dark-colored bands running around the planet at higher latitudes. A 1986 paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters sought to explain this, theorizing that the ring particles were becoming entrained in Saturn’s magnetic field, plunging toward the planet and creating what amounted to a “ring rain,” whic...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized onetime space Source Type: news