It’s official: Saturn is losing its iconic rings, and it’s losing it much faster than expected

If you identify Saturn in a crowd, you’ll probably recognize it by its famous rings. They are the largest and brightest rings in our solar system. Stretches more than 280,000 km across the planet and is large enough to accommodate six Earths in a row. Saturn won’t be like this for a long time. Because his rings are disappearing.

That’s right, Saturn’s rings are disappearing! And quickly. Much faster, in fact, than researchers predicted. Saturn now receives 10,000 kg of ring rain every second. Fast enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool in less than 30 minutes.

This rain is made up of debris from Saturn’s rings. Saturn’s rings are largely made up of pieces of ice and rock. They are constantly bombarded: some by UV rays from the Sun, while others by small meteorites.

When the frozen particles collide, they evaporate, creating charged water molecules that interact with Saturn’s magnetic field before falling into Saturn and burning up in the atmosphere.

Ring rain has been known about since the 1980s, when NASA’s Voyager space probe discovered mysterious, dark bands that turned out to be ring rain trapped in Saturn’s magnetic field.Researchers predict that the rings will be completely empty within 300 million years.

However, the discoveries of NASA’s former satellite Cassini paint a bleak picture. Cassini was able to better understand how much ring dust fell on Saturn’s equator before it fell on Saturn in 2017.

It was also noticeable that it rained more heavily than expected. Based on improved measurements, scientists concluded that the rings only had 100 million years of life left. Now it’s difficult to imagine Saturn without rings.

However, the planet was as barren as Earth for most of its existence. Although Saturn formed about 4.5 BILLION years ago, research shows that the rings are at most 100 to 200 million years old. This makes them younger than some dinosaurs.

If you think about it, we are really lucky to have witnessed these spectacular rings.Today, our attempts to study these rings have led us to new discoveries.