Saturn Put A Ring On It Relatively Recently, Study Says (npr.org) 50
Saturn is famous for its lovely rings, but a new study suggests the planet has spent most of its 4.5 billion years without them. From a report: That's because the rings are likely only 10 million to 100 million years old, according to a newly published report in the journal Science that's based on findings from NASA's Cassini probe. Cassini spent some 13 years orbiting Saturn before plunging down and slamming into its atmosphere. During its final orbits, the spacecraft dove between the planet and its rings. That let scientists measure the gravitational effect of the rings and get a good estimate of the ring material's mass.
What they found is that it's only about 40 percent of the mass of Saturn's moon Mimas, which is way smaller than Earth's moon. This small mass suggests that the rings are relatively young. That's because the rings seem to be made of extremely pure water ice, suggesting that the bright white rings have not existed long enough to be contaminated by the bombardment of messy, dirty comets that would be expected to occur over billions of years. Some scientists thought it was possible that darker debris from comets might lie beneath the bright ice, undetectable to their instruments, but this new study shows that isn't the case.
What they found is that it's only about 40 percent of the mass of Saturn's moon Mimas, which is way smaller than Earth's moon. This small mass suggests that the rings are relatively young. That's because the rings seem to be made of extremely pure water ice, suggesting that the bright white rings have not existed long enough to be contaminated by the bombardment of messy, dirty comets that would be expected to occur over billions of years. Some scientists thought it was possible that darker debris from comets might lie beneath the bright ice, undetectable to their instruments, but this new study shows that isn't the case.
So where did they come from? (Score:2)
IF they are young, where did they come from and why are they nearly pure water?
Seems to me that is the real question here...
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Hello Miss Mash, The title has mention about a "spacecraft dove." Please elaborate on what a spacecraft dove is, or correct the error. Thanks! Editor Tim (I run another news site.)
Did you read it or have you read it?
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From the article:
"It's possible that the rings are the remnants of a comet or some other icy object that made a chance encounter with Saturn and got ripped up, he says. Or, perhaps one of Saturn's icy moons got whacked by an impact with a large comet."
Now, how it would make sense to both be "a remnant from some comet" but also "they're new, and not contaminated by dirty comets" - that one I don't get.
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Now, how it would make sense to both be "a remnant from some comet" but also "they're new, and not contaminated by dirty comets" - that one I don't get.
Looks like comets are clean ice below their surface [universe-review.ca], so it would imagine it would be a case of - pulverizing a comet made mostly of clean ice vs collecting the dirty surface outgassings of passing comets over billions of years.
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Man, as cool as it was when Shoemaker-Levy hit Jupiter, I can't even imagine what that kind of show might have been like, when Saturn got its rings.
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I suspect it might have been a bit slow.
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Enceladus, maybe? All that water coming out of it must be going somewhere, right?
And they are going away (Score:2)
Not only are Saturn's rings young, but it appears they are going away soon [foxnews.com] (astronomically speaking), so if you think about it we are all kind of amazingly lucky to be around while they are here to admire the amazing beauty they offer!
It also completely removes any inhibitions to mine them for valuable resources.
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It also completely removes any inhibitions to mine them for valuable resources.
Not really. That's a strange definition of "soon". The 50-100 million years it's expected to take for them to disappear is functionally equivalent to "forever" when compared to human life spans or human civilization (or even the human species). If we were a space faring species with the ability to mine Saturn's rings to the extent that we could cause them to disappear within the span of several generations, the correct response is not automatically "well, they are technically disappearing anyway - it's f
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Yeah, but that kind of nihilistic argument can be used against aesthetics in general. I mean, if nothing matters anyway why bother making or preserving anything beautiful for our children?
My point was that if it's acceptable and good to preserve occurrences of beauty in nature then it's not ok to just bend the timeline longer and say "look, if I go massively far enough into the future it's going to go away so it's fine to despoil it now." And if it's not acceptable and good to preserve occurrences of beau
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Re:And they are going away (Score:4, Informative)
Speak for yourself. As a geologist, I'm quite used to thinking of error bars bigger than that. You're just having a calculation failure.
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Not only are Saturn's rings young, but it appears they are going away soon
I can't wait to tell my great^300,000 grandchildren about how I remember when Saturn had rings. It was around the time that Pluto was still a planet, and Ceres was still pissed about it [memeguy.com]
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Where did it come from? Was there a water containing moot that got crashed into? Or did a comet crash into an object orbiting Saturn, or did Saturn pass though a comet debris field and collect the objects?
That's the problem. Comets are slushy mud balls, not pure water. So the rings are not just some parts of a comet that got caught in orbit around Saturn, at least not directly. It's also why I'm asking the question. IF it's not possible for the rings to have come from a comet because of their composition, where did they come from?
Ice moon (Score:2)
my suspicion: an ice moon.
i.e.: an object big enough to have some significant gravity, enough gravity so the heavier elements can sink to the bottom, while the water/ice remains on its surface.
(as opposed to commets which barely have enough gravity to hold the wet dust mud together)
if such moon gets ripped appart (getting to close and tidal forces) the ice will be relatively clean ( but then you'll also be having rock fragments ).
is there any speciallist that could help us ?
(cue in McCoy's "i'm a Doctro, Ji
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that's no moon
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that's no moon
That's yo mamma
Interesting (Score:3)
It would be very interesting if they could collect samples of this ice and compare it to Earth's.
It's been believed that water came here via comets, I wonder if those are the same comets that made up those "pure ice" rings
Monoliths. (Score:3)
We all know that Saturn's rings were created about 3 million years ago, when the aliens who built the Monolith built the Star Gate.
Read the documentary book 2001: A Space Odyssey. Note that the film version does not contain this portion of history.
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Ironically, the reason the movie moved the ending from Saturn to Jupiter was because they couldn't come up with a suitable visual effect for Saturn's rings.
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Came here solely to make this comment. Alas, I was ninja'd by sconeu. Every time I hear a theory about the formation of Saturn's rings, I am reminded of that book.
As to why the rings contain more water (or rather, less dirt) than comets, one theory I read was that it had something to do with the frequency of impacts and collisions. The chunks would smash into each other, shatter
I guess (Score:2)
Saturn must'a liked it.
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Came here to find a post like this one. Was not disappointed.
poor saturn (Score:2)
it only just got it's rings, and it's already losing them;
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/n... [nasa.gov]