Experts don’t agree on age of Saturn’s rings | Science News
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/experts-dont-agree-age-saturn-rings
Saturn’s rings have maintained a youthful look, while still possibly being almost as old as the solar system itself. The dazzling belts
of ice continue to keep their age a secret, but researchers hope to get answers from a spacecraft orbiting the ringed planet.
Data from the Cassini spacecraft, in orbit since 2004, may help resolve a decades-long debate over the age of Saturn’s rings, wide belts of shiny ice
chunks orbiting the planet. They may be primordial, dating back to roughly 4.6 billion years ago, or a recent addition in the last 100 million years
or so. Evidence for both scenarios was presented October 16 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences.
There’s not enough pollution in the rings for them to have been around for a long time, argues planetary scientist Paul Estrada of the SETI Institute
in Mountain View, Calif. Cassini data show that about 25 times as much debris — mostly from the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune — rains down on the rings
than previously thought. All that interplanetary rain should not just darken the rings, but each impact should redistribute material as well. Sharp
contrasts in composition seen at the inner edge of the main ring can’t have been sustained for more than a few hundred million years, Estrada says.
The trouble with making rings so recently is how to do it. “It’s hard to make rings in the last 100 million years,” says Larry Esposito, a planetary
scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder. “This is not an exciting time.” Saturn’s rings were probably created after a moon or some passing icy
body got torn apart in a collision or by wandering too close to the planet. But there hasn’t been much stuff flying around Saturn or the solar system
in the last several billion years.