Saturn Is Officially Losing Its Rings

[Music] if you were to pick saturn out of a lineup you'd probably recognize it by its iconic rings they're the biggest brightest rings in our solar system extending over 280 000 kilometers from the planet wide enough to fit six earths in a row but saturn won't always look this way because its rings are disappearing that's right saturn is losing its rings and fast much faster even than scientists had first thought right now it's raining 10 000 kilograms of ring rain on saturn per second fast enough to fill an olympic-sized pool in half an hour this rain is actually the disintegrated remains of saturn's rings saturn's rings are mostly made up of chunks of ice and rock which are under constant bombardment some by uv radiation from the sun and others by tiny meteoroids when these collisions take place the icy particles vaporize forming charged water molecules that interact with saturn's magnetic field ultimately falling towards saturn where they burn up in the atmosphere we've known about ring rain since the 1980s when nasa's voyager mission first noticed mysterious dark bands that turned out to be ring rain caught in saturn's magnetic fields back then researchers estimated the rings would totally drain in 300 million years but observations by nasa's former cassini spacecraft give a darker prognosis before its death dive into saturn in 2017 cassini managed to get a better look at the amount of ring dust raining on saturn's equator and discovered that it was raining heavier than previously thought scientists calculated the rings had only a hundred million years left to live it's tough to imagine a ringless saturn but for much of its existence the planet was as naked as earth while saturn first formed around 4.5 billion years ago studies suggest the rings are only a hundred to two hundred million years old tops that's younger than some dinosaurs so when you think about it we're pretty lucky we happen to be around to see those magnificent rings really lucky in fact because efforts to study those rings have led us to other discoveries for example as cassini explored saturn's moon enceladus it uncovered a trail of ice and gas leading back to saturn's e-ring enceladus is the whitest most reflective moon in our solar system the moon is constantly gushing out gas and dust some of it ends up in space and in saturn's e-ring while the rest drifts back onto the moon's surface creating a blinding white field of snow who knows what other discoveries might be hiding within the rings at the very least it's clear we'd better keep looking while we still can

Channel: Insider Tech

Views: 1,392,427

Keywords: Tech Insider, TI, Tech, Science, Innovation, Digital culture, saturn, space, stars, moon, earth, saturn rings

Id: 9hYbrm54VkQ

Length: 3min 26sec (206 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 23 2018