3 things we know about Saturn’s rings

Saturn’s awesome rings – thin bands of orbiting water ice and rock particles – are one of the massive planet’s most distinctive characteristics. They’re also one of its biggest mysteries.

Unlike the rings around the other giant gaseous planets, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, the ones around Saturn are larger and more complex. They’ve stumped scientists since 1610, when Galileo Galilei first raised a telescope and observed them with his new invention.

How old are they? How do they maintain their orbit? And, why are they there, anyway?

In the next few months, we may learn a lot more. Low on fuel, the unmanned Cassini spacecraft is now in the “Grand Finale” of a 20-year mission: a series of daring swoops through the unexplored outer edges of the main rings of Saturn. The unprecedented views began in November and will end April 22, 2017, when Cassini begins its planned fiery plunge to destruction in Saturn’s clouds.

In its closing dives, Cassini will provide a stream of images, giving scientists an up close look at the rings and the best information so far to help to decipher their origins.  

“The rings are so magnificent and awe-inspiring, it’s impossible for us to resist the mystery of how they came to be,” said Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker, with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. 

Among some of Cassini’s tantalizing lessons so far:

1. Saturn’s moons continually reshape its elegant rings.

A closeup of the Saturn moon Daphnis apparently creating ripples in Saturn’s rings, as captured by NASA’s Cassini Spacecraft in January 2017.

Gravitational pull from Saturn’s 62 known moons shapes and alters the orbiting rings, occasionally distorting their patterns with waves, warps, kinks and gaps.

On January 16, Cassini captured detailed images of the five-mile-wide moon Daphnis as it swept through the Keeler Gap, a dust-free band in the outermost “A ring” of Saturn. The little planet’s gravity raised waves seen on the edges of the gap. Scientists believe the orbiting moon keeps this portion of the ring clear.

Earlier images depicted propeller-shaped swirls in the rings, produced by “moonlets” apparently hiding in the rings.

2. The rings possess their own atmosphere, separate from that of the planet itself.

A panoramic view of Saturn and its rings assembled from 165 images Cassini took over three hours in 2006.

In 2005, Cassini delivered data that showed an atmosphere-like environment around the rings made up of molecular oxygen. The two atoms of oxygen bound together – much like that found in earth’s atmosphere – are created when ultraviolet rays of the sun hit icy dust in the rings and split them into their building blocks: hydrogen and oxygen.

The oxygen atmosphere of the rings is very different from the atmosphere of the planet itself, which is mostly hydrogen.

3. The brightest, most opaque areas of Saturn’s rings contain no more mass or material than its more transparent rings.

Thanks to Cassini, scientists were able to “weigh” the nearly opaque center of the most opaque B ring, the brightest and most opaque ring, for the first time. They found surprisingly little correlation between how dense a ring might appear to be – in terms of its opacity and reflectiveness – and the amount of material it contains.

For example, some parts of Saturn’s B ring are up to 10 times more opaque than the neighboring A ring, but the B ring may weigh in at only two to three times the A ring’s mass.

Research on the mass of Saturn’s rings has important implications for determining their age, history and formation.

“By ‘weighing’ the core of the B ring for the first time, this study makes a meaningful step in our quest to piece together the age and origin of Saturn’s rings,” said NASA’s Linda Spilker.

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