Study discovers the true age of Saturn’s rings

A new study from the University of Colorado Boulder was published in the journal Science Advances The true age of Saturn’s famous rings revealed. According to researchers, they are more than 400 million years old. This means that they are much younger than their home planet, which formed about 4.5 billion years ago.

In 1610, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei first observed the rings of Saturn through a telescope. According to NASA studies, Rings are made of pieces of ice or rock covered with ice (some are the size of a bus) that fall to the planet due to its intense gravity, and orbit around it like a satellite.

Calculating the rings’ age was made possible by samples collected by the cosmic dust analyzer aboard NASA’s newest spacecraft, Cassini. “We know approximately how old the rings are, but this doesn’t solve any of our other problems,” said Sascha Kempf, the study’s head. “We still don’t know how these rings formed in the first place.”completed.

Although their origin is not known, the study indicates that Saturn’s rings are a new phenomenon, as they appeared in a period equivalent to the blink of an eye in cosmic terms. And just as they appeared, they could disappear in a relatively short time. In previous research, NASA scientists reported that ring ice is slowly falling on the planet. And it could cause them to disappear completely in about 100 million years.