Saturn is losing its rings at the rate of one Olympic-sized pool every half an hour.

New NASA research confirms that Saturn is losing its iconic rings at the maximum rate estimated from Voyager 1 & 2 observations made decades ago. The rings are being pulled into Saturn by gravity as a dusty rain of ice particles under the influence of Saturn’s magnetic field.

“We estimate that this ‘ring rain’ drains an amount of water products that could fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool from Saturn’s rings in half an hour,” said James O’Donoghue of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “From this alone, the entire ring system will be gone in 300 million years, but add to this the Cassini-spacecraft measured ring-material detected falling into Saturn’s equator, and the rings have less than 100 million years to live. This is relatively short, compared to Saturn’s age of over 4 billion years.” O’Donoghue is lead author of a study on Saturn’s ring rain appearing in Icarus December 17.

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Bubblecar said:

Saturn is losing its rings at the rate of one Olympic-sized pool every half an hour.

New NASA research confirms that Saturn is losing its iconic rings at the maximum rate estimated from Voyager 1 & 2 observations made decades ago. The rings are being pulled into Saturn by gravity as a dusty rain of ice particles under the influence of Saturn’s magnetic field.

“We estimate that this ‘ring rain’ drains an amount of water products that could fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool from Saturn’s rings in half an hour,” said James O’Donoghue of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “From this alone, the entire ring system will be gone in 300 million years, but add to this the Cassini-spacecraft measured ring-material detected falling into Saturn’s equator, and the rings have less than 100 million years to live. This is relatively short, compared to Saturn’s age of over 4 billion years.” O’Donoghue is lead author of a study on Saturn’s ring rain appearing in Icarus December 17.

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The last plunge of Cassini was designed to test this. But I thought that it had not found any rain of ring particles into the planet.

Perhaps Saturn’s shepherd moons will replenish the rings over millions of years, impacts and the like throwing material captured

I’ll start a go fund me page to send crap upthere to refill the rings.

Divine Angel said:

I’ll start a go fund me page to send crap upthere to refill the rings.

Don’t send crap, send glitter. They’ll shine even brighter.

Bubblecar said:

Divine Angel said:

I’ll start a go fund me page to send crap upthere to refill the rings.

Don’t send crap, send glitter. They’ll shine even brighter.

I wanted them to park Cassini in the rings. But you’re right, dropping glitter into the rings would be a very interesting experiment – we could watch how it moves as the years pass. If the glitter is metal based then we could also track it on radar.