The colorful icy rings that symbolize Saturn could soon disappear, a study has found. It is an analysis that Saturn’s icy rings are relatively recent and may disappear over time.
American and European scientists recently analyzed in the international journals Science Advances and Icarus based on data collected by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) Cassini-Huygens probes when they pass Saturn from 2004 to 2017. Three studies were published on Saturn’s rings one after the other.
Saturn’s symbolic rings extend from 70,000 to 140,000 km above Saturn’s equator. Some rings are around 10m thick, but some rings are over 1km long. Saturn’s rings look colorful, but in reality they are a mess of ice, asteroid fragments and micrometeoroids ranging in size from small sand to small rocks orbiting Mars. Over time, this material mixes with more and more cosmic dust, giving it a darker color. Scientists are trying to find out how old the ice cubes are by looking at the color of Mars’ rings.
An international joint research team including the University of Colorado in the United States and the University of Stuttgart in Germany analyzed 163 dust grains collected around Saturn in the international journal Science Advances on the 12th (local time) of this month and found that rings are not Saturn does that. more than 400 million years old, it was revealed that they discovered It means that Saturn’s rings were formed around the time dinosaurs ruled the world on Earth. Saturn is estimated to be 4.5 billion years old, but the rings were formed long after Saturn was formed.
Another study published by Indiana University, NASA, and the SETI Research Institute’s Carl Sagan Center research team, published in the international academic journal Icarus three days later, on the 15th of this month, found that the visible Saturn rings on currently appears to be permanent. , but temporary. It contains information that could be a celestial body.
According to the researchers, pieces of ice and rock that make up Saturn’s rings are pushed towards Saturn by meteors hurtling from space. According to another paper published by the team on the same day in Icarus, Saturn’s rings continue to lose mass at a rate of several tonnes per second. Researchers estimate that Saturn’s icy cycles could last as long as 15 to 400 million years.
The analysis that Saturn’s rings could disappear has also been raised in other studies. Some scientists believe that Saturn’s rings will disappear within 100 million years. Sasha Kemp, a professor at the University of Colorado who participated in the study, said in an interview with Science News, an American science journal, “Saturn’s rings are not very old in the history of the universe and may not last long in the future. “I’m lucky,” he said.
Besides Saturn, Uranus and Neptune also have rings in the solar system. Scientists predict that over time, Saturn’s rings may look like darker, thinner rings around Uranus and Neptune.
The age of Saturn’s rings has long been a matter of debate among astronomers. Despite this research, it is noted that few people will still disagree that Saturn’s rings are relatively recent. In fact, some scholars not involved in the study claim that Saturn’s rings are as old as Saturn itself. Nevertheless, it is evaluated that this study has presented a sufficiently new foundation for understanding Saturn’s rings.
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Science Progress (2023), DOI: DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adf8537
ICARUS(2023), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2022.115221
