The universe beyond our planet has a ton of breathtaking sights to see, but one of most beautiful that's also pretty close to us is Saturn and its rings.
Unfortunately, scientists have some bad news for astronomy buffs, as it seems those rings won't last forever.
Images courtesy: NASA
In fact, a recent NASA study found that the iconic rings of Saturn are disappearing, and really fast at that. They're not solid after all, they just look that way from the distance we're at. In fact, the rings are a veritable clutter of dust, gas, ice, and rocks. Because of the differences in mass, composition, and more, they also behave slightly differently under the influence of gravity and magnetic fields.
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For instance, the rocks and dust in the rings tend to stay pretty much undisturbed. The ice on the other hand is pulled around the planet by its magnetic field. Because of this, it tends to also get pulled so far it falls to the planet's surface, a phenomenon called "ring rain".
Ring rain is a concept researchers have posited ever since the Voyager probes first took photos of the planet on their flyby's in the 1980's. More recently, the Cassini mission confirmed it for sure.
Now, new observations from the Keck telescope in Hawaii tell us just how much ring rain there is. Apparently, around 1,814 kg of ice drops to Saturn's surface every second. That's enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool in 30 minutes. And according to NASA, if the ring rain stays at that rate, Saturn will lose its inner rings will be gone in about 100 million years.
That's an incredibly short time for such a drastic change, especially considering Saturn is estimated to be about 4 billion years old. Because of this, scientists now believe Saturn may not have formed with its rings at all, but rather acquired them later in life, ?perhaps when small, icy moons in orbit around the planet smashed into it.
"We are lucky to be around to see Saturn's ring system, which appears to be in the middle of its lifetime," says James O'Donoghue of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "However, if rings are temporary, perhaps we just missed out on seeing giant ring systems of Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, which have only thin ringlets today!"