Saturn’s rings disappear

All evidence points to this fact: Saturn’s beautiful rings, the most luminous planet in the solar system, are fading out. The good news is that they do it very slowly, so goodbyes will be a long goodbye. as it seems from Atlantic OceanIt is hard to imagine Saturn without its rings. As I mentioned before space place from NASA, There are between 500 and 1,000 loops with a width of 400,000 kmwhich is equivalent to the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

rings Made up of particles, in some cases the size of a bus, which are ice balls, or rocks covered with ice. according to National GeographicOne theory sheds light on its origin in small, icy moons orbiting Saturn, which eventually collided, possibly influenced by the gravity of some asteroids or comets. It is possible that other planets, such as Jupiter, have had rings in the past. In fact, Uranus also has its own rings, or the very faint rings of Neptune.

In 2004, the Cassini space probe reached Saturn, and remained there until 2017 to study its rings and moons, something that the Voyager spacecraft initiated. Cassini carried the Huygens probe that parachuted over Saturn’s giant moon Titan, providing stunning images of its surface never before seen. What is new is that it is now known that Saturn’s rings are disappearing faster than previously thought..

rain of rings

NASA explained that the rings are being pulled toward the planet by the gravity of the giant gas.. That’s why the rings disappear in the form of dusty icy rain. NASA’s James O’Donoghue posted a file Study the chemistry involvedWhere he indicated that Enough water flowing from the rings to fill an Olympic swimming pool in just half an hour.

With this decay time, It is estimated that its existence will not last more than 300 million years, which is a smaller number considering that Saturn is over 4 billion years old. Incoming micro-meteoroids and solar radiation disturb the tiny bits of matter in the rings, electrifying these bits. What happens is that the particles, which are suddenly shifted, chime with the lines of the magnetic field of Saturn and begin to rotate along these invisible paths.

When particles get very close to the top of Saturn’s atmosphere, gravity pulls them inward and evaporates into the planet’s clouds. Astronomers call this process “ring rain.”and, in time, this and other phenomena will undermine the characteristic element that, for us, makes Saturn Saturn, until there is nothing left.

The first dinosaurs you didn’t see

Either way, Saturn will lose its rings, but although scientists already know this, Little will change in the course of our earthly life. Although Saturn was one of the first things we were able to spot in the sky, the first approach was taken by the Voyager spacecraft in the 1980s, which flew close to the planet.

At the time, scientists suspected that the rings formed around Saturn about 4,600 million years ago, when the solar system was young and bustling. Back then, with rocky bodies flying all over the place, a new planet could easily have picked up some, shoving them around its center and letting gravity flatten them out. But Note Voyager suggested another story.

Observations captured the rings in more detail than ever before, revealing that the system wasn’t as massive as the researchers had expected, meaning it couldn’t be billions of years old. The rings should have been much younger, perhaps only 10 to 100 million years old. That is, they did not exist when dinosaurs began to inhabit the Earth..