As much as Saturn’s rings may disappear in less than 100 million years because gravity pulls them towards the planet, apparently they haven’t been there all along. The discovery was published in the scientific journal Science last Thursday (14).
When NASA’s Cassini spacecraft dove into the planet’s atmosphere to end its 20-year mission in 2017, it delved deeper into the planet and its rings. The last act before the disintegration was to precisely measure the amount of material in Saturn’s rings, as knowing the densities allows scientists to establish the age of the rings.
Saturn’s rings are 40% made up of the moon Mimas — which has an impact crater on its surface that makes people compare it to the Death Star from Star Wars.
Scientists now believe that the rings formed less than 100 million years ago, or even “only” 10 million years ago.
The age of the rings has been debated by scientists for years. Some believe that they were formed close to the planet, 4.5 billion years ago, and would be formed by icy remnants left over from the formation of the solar system. Others claimed that the rings captured material from the Kuiper belt or a comet, reduced over time to orbit Saturn.
“These discoveries were only possible because Cassini traveled very close to the surface in its final hours,” Burkhard Militzer, study author and professor of Planetary and Earth Sciences at UC Berkeley in California, said in a statement. “It was a classic and spectacular way to end the mission.”
To get the data right, however, scientists had to consider the winds in Saturn’s atmosphere. The flows resemble charged clouds at about 6,000 miles deep. Surface clouds at Saturn’s equator rotate 4% faster than this deep layer.
“The discovery of the deep rotating layers is a startling revelation about the planet’s internal structure,” said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “The question is what makes the fastest rotating part of the atmosphere go so deep and what does that tell us about Saturn’s interior.”
They also determined that the rocky core of the planet is between 15 and 18 times the mass of Earth.
And the mystery of how long a day lasts on Saturn has finally been solved, also thanks to Cassini: 10 hours, 33 minutes and 38 seconds. This discovery was reported in the Astrophysical Journal.
This adds to the earlier scientific results of Cassini’s “death dive”, which are unraveling the mysteries of Saturn.
Source: CNN Brasil
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