The scientist says Saturn could be losing its rings within 100 million years

News24xx.com -  The astronomers said that Saturn could be losing its iconic rings as an Olympic swimming pool amount of water drains from them every half an hour. 

This condition occured because the chunks of ice spinning around the gas planet are being pulled in by gravity under the influence of its magnetic field. This means the rings could be gone within 100 million years.

Although 100 million years might sounds like a long way off, the time span is comparatively short compared to Saturn’s age of over 4 billion years.

Dr James O’Donoghue, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, and his colleagues have used instruments attached to the Keck telescope in Hawaii to discover the phenomenon.  Dr O’Donoghue’s research will now explore how the rings change according to changes in Saturn’s seasons. 

According to them, they estimating that the ‘ring rain’ drains an Olympic swimming pool of water every 30 minutes, and the ice circles are dying at the maximum rate estimated from observations made decades ago. 

The first hints that ring rain existed came from Voyager observations of a seemingly unrelated occurrence.

These included changes in Saturn’s upper atmosphere, density variations in the rings and three narrow dark bands around the planet at northern mid-latitudes. 

In 1986, Jack Connerney of NASA Goddard published a paper in Geophysical Research Letters that linked the dark bands to the shape of Saturn’s magnetic field. This suggested that electrically-charged ice particles from the rings were flowing down invisible magnetic field lines – and dumping water in the upper atmosphere. 

Until now, the origins of Saturn’s rings have long puzzled scientists, who are still unsure if the planet was formed with the rings or if it acquired them at a later stage.

Theories which could explain the origin of the rings include the idea they came about when small icy moons collided after their orbits were disturbed by a passing asteroid or comet. 

 

 

 

 

NEWS24XX.COM/DEV/RED