According to new research published on Monday, Saturn’s rings may disappear completely in just 100 million years, which is just a blink of the eye on a cosmic scale.
Saturn’s rings are mostly chunks of water ice ranging in size from microscopic dust grains to boulders several yards (metres) across. The rings are being pulled into Saturn by gravity as a dusty rain of ice particles under the influence of Saturn’s magnetic field.
NASA research has found that Saturn’s rings are “raining” inward towards the planet at an unsustainable rate. This was first estimated by Voyager I and II when those probes made flybys of the planet, but additional observations by Cassini have confirmed the mass loss is running at the upper end of the rate first measured decades ago.
“We estimate that this ‘ring rain’ drains an amount of water products that could fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool from Saturn’s rings in half an hour,” NASA’s James O’Donoghue, lead author of the study, said in a statement.
“From this alone, the entire ring system will be gone in 300 million years, but add to this the Cassini-spacecraft measured ring-material detected falling into Saturn’s equator, and the rings have less than 100 million years to live,” he added.
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