Peer-reviewed literature and scientific reporting from the Cassini mission indicate that Saturn's rings are losing mass through mechanisms such as ring rain and micrometeoroid bombardment, leading to estimates that the rings will disappear in tens to hundreds of millions of years.
The Cassini mission provided key measurements needed to determine the absolute age of Saturn's rings, including the extrinsic micrometeoroid flux at Saturn, the volume fraction of non-icy pollutants in the rings, and the total ring mass. These three factors constrain the ring age to be no more than a few 100 Myr (Kempf et al., 2023). Observations during the Cassini Grand Finale also showed that the rings are losing mass to the planet at a prodigious rate. Some of the mass flux falls as"ring rain"at high latitudes. However, the influx in ring rain is considerably less than the total measured mass influx of 4800 to 45000 kg/s at lower latitudes (Waite et al., 2018). In addition to polluting the rings, micrometeoroid impacts lead to ballistic transport, the mass and angular momentum transport due to net exchanges of meteoroid impact ejecta. Because the ejecta are predominantly prograde, they carry net angular momentum outward. As a result, ring material drifts inward toward the planet. Here, for the first time, we use a simple model to quantify this radial mass inflow rate for dense rings and find that, for plausible choices of parameters, ballistic transport and mass loading by meteoroids can produce a total inward flux of material in the inner B ring and in the C ring that is on the order of a few x 10^3 to a few x 10^4 kg/s, in agreement with measurements during the Cassini Grand Finale. From these mass inflow rates, we estimate that the remaining ring lifetime is ~15 to 400 Myr. Combining this with a revised pollution age of ~120 Myr, we conclude that Saturn's rings are not only young but ephemeral and probably started their evolution on a similar timescale to their pollution age with an initial mass of one to a few Mimas masses.
Saturn Could Lose Its Rings in Less Than 100 Million Years Skip to main content
Science| September 2019
# Saturn Could Lose Its Rings in Less Than 100 Million Years
Recent discoveries suggest that the planet’s distinctive feature may be gone in the cosmic blink of an eye
In the image captured by Cassini, the rings are illuminated both by direct sunlight and by light reflected off Saturn's cloud tops. NASA
In the image captured by Cassini, the rings are illuminated both by direct sunlight and by light reflected off Saturn's cloud tops. NASA
If someone asked you to draw a planet other than ours, you would likely draw Saturn, and that is because of its rings. But for most of history, human beings couldn’t see the rings. Not the astronomers of ancient India, Egypt, Babylon or the Islamic world. Not Ptolemy or the Greco-Romans, who nonetheless discerned that Saturn was farther from Earth than Mercury or Venus. Not Nicolaus Copernicus, who showed that the Earth was just another planet orbiting the Sun. And not even Tycho Brahe, the Danish nobleman and alchemist, who attempted to calculate Saturn’s diameter (he was way off).
It was Galileo Galilei who first spotted something there.
The Long Goodbye to Saturn's Rings - The Atlantic
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
Of all the planets in our solar system, Saturn might be the prettiest. Those rings! Strand after strand of icy material with just a hint of rock, arranged in a delicate halo. Up close, the rings gleam in soft pinks, grays, and browns, shimmering in the darkness. It’s hard to imagine Saturn without them.
But Saturn’s rings aren’t a permanent feature. In fact, they’re vanishing.
The rings are losing material every year. Incoming micrometeorites and the sun’s radiation disturb the small, dusty pieces of ring matter, electrifying them. The particles, suddenly transformed, become attuned to Saturn’s magnetic field lines and start spiraling along those invisible paths. When the particles get too close to the top of Saturn’s atmosphere, gravity pulls them in, and
Everything we examined (3)
This check searched the claim as stated. It did not run a separate search for evidence against it.