Researchers arrived at this answer by studying tiny grains of rocky material coursing through Earth’s solar system on an almost continuous basis. (Photo: shutterstock)
Observations suggest that these features are composed of approximately 98 percent pure water ice by volume, with only a small amount of rocky material.
Researchers have estimated the age of the planet Saturn’s rings to be no more than 400 million years old, potentially answering a question that has puzzled scientists for more than a century. The study, led by physicist Sasha Kempf at the University of Colorado Boulder in the US, said it provided the strongest evidence yet that Saturn’s rings are remarkably young, much younger than Saturn itself, which is roughly 4.5 billion years old. Researchers arrived at this answer by studying tiny grains of rocky material coursing through Earth’s solar system on an almost continuous basis. In some cases, he said, this flow can leave a thin layer of dust on planetary bodies, including the ice that makes up Saturn’s rings.
In this study, Kempf and his colleagues determined these rings by studying how fast this layer of dust formed. “Think of the rings like the carpet in your house,” Kempf said. “If you have a clean carpet, you just have to wait. Dust will settle on your carpet. The same is true for rings.
Dubbing the process “arduous”, the team used an instrument called the Cosmic Dust Analyzer aboard America’s NASA’s late Cassini spacecraft to analyze dust particles that flew around Saturn, from 2004 to 2017.
Based on counts of 163 grains collected over those 13 years, all of which originated beyond the planet’s close neighborhood, Saturn’s rings have probably been collecting dust for only a few hundred million years.
Planetary rings, on the other hand, are new phenomena, the researchers said, appearing, and potentially even disappearing, in what amounts to a cosmic blink of an eye.
“We still don’t know how these rings formed in the first place,” Kempf said. Today, scientists know that Saturn holds seven rings that contain countless chunks of ice, no larger than a boulder on Earth. Altogether, this ice weighs about half as much as Saturn’s moon Mimas and extends about 2.8 million kilometers from the planet’s surface. Kempf said that most scientists of the 20th century had the idea and belief that the rings must have formed at the same time that Saturn raised some issues, namely that Saturn’s rings are shining brightly.
observations suggest that these features are composed of about 98 percent
Pure water
Ice by volume, with only small amounts of rocky material.
Kempf said, “It’s almost impossible to end up with something so clean.”
The spacecraft Cassini first arrived at Saturn in 2004 and collected data until it crashed into the planet’s atmosphere in 2017.
(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed)
