They have come to estimate the age of Saturn's rings, this is a new study led by a physicist at the University of Boulder in the United States and has provided the strongest evidence so far that Saturn's rings are very young in cosmic scale.
It is a question that astronomers have been asking for more than a century when Saturn's rings formed and why they formed, the research has been published on May 12 in a scientific journal and sets the age of Saturn's rings at no more than 400 million years, that makes the Rings much younger than Saturn itself, which is about 4,500 million years old and on a cosmic scale they are quite recent, the curious thing is how researchers have reached this conclusion.
Have you ever seen Gordon Ramsay's shows, where he goes into a kitchen or a hotel room and runs his finger through the layer of dust and from this he can deduce how long it hasn't been cleaned, the place, well, the method he used. The scientists followed was similar. They measured the amount of dust that had accumulated in the rings to find out how old they were.
Dust is something that exists throughout the solar system, small specks of rocky material are crossing space and even reaching the earth, which we can see as shooting stars but they reach everywhere, not just the earth, they reach the moon at asteroids, the ice rocks of Saturn's rings as well, and over millions of years they create a fine layer of dust.
But first, the scientists had to refine their calculation and know the amount of dust that is hanging around Saturn and that meant an investigation that lasted a long time, from 2004 to 2017 in those years the team used an instrument called a cosmic dust analyzer. who was traveling aboard NASA's Casini spacecraft, which no longer exists, crashed into Saturn years ago.
But thanks to that research, during those 13 years, the analyzer collected 163 grains of dust, very little even for Gordon Ramsay, but enough to make a calculation about the rate of dust that is deposited in Saturn's rings, with that calculation they were able to They analyzed the age of Saturn's rings and came to the conclusion that they were at most 400 million years old, which, as I already said, is very little on a cosmic scale.
It is believed that the rings were formed when a small moon of Saturn was completely destroyed, there is debate between whether the moon was destroyed because it got too close to the planet and Saturn's gravity broke it or that it was destroyed because an asteroid crashed into it or a great Comet, the matter is not clear, what is known is that the rings will not last forever, the calculation is that they will end up disappearing in about 100 million years, so we have been lucky to be able to live in the era in which Saturn has rings bright and shimmering rings although it is not the only planet with rings.
Uranus and Neptune have rings, Jupiter also has a ring system, although it is much weaker than Saturn's and above all it is very dusty so it is very difficult to capture, it seems that rings are a common feature of large planets and that it is a temporary characteristic that is created by a catastrophic event and that can disappear after a certain time or be created again if the destruction of a moon occurs, something that could also happen on Saturn or Jupiter.
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