How old are Saturn’s rings? New research has answers

Subject: Science and Technology

Section: Space technology

Context: Researchers have pegged the planet Saturn’s rings’ age at no more than 400 million years old

What are the new findings?

Saturn’s rings are remarkably young, much younger than Saturn itself, which is about 4.5 billion years old.
The researchers arrived this by studying tiny grains of rocky material washing through the Earth’s solar system on an almost constant basis.
In some cases, this flux can leave behind a thin layer of dust on planetary bodies, including on the ice that makes up Saturn’s rings
Think about the rings like the carpet in your house. “If you have a clean carpet laid out, you just have to wait. Dust will settle on your carpet. The same is true for the rings
Scientists used an instrument called the Cosmic Dust Analyzer aboard US’s NASA’s late Cassini spacecraft to analyse specks of dust flying around Saturn
Based on calculations on the 163 grains collected over those 13 years, all of which had originated from beyond the planet’s close neighborhood, Saturn’s rings have likely been gathering dust for only a few hundred million years
Saturn hosts seven rings comprised of countless chunks of ice, most no bigger than a boulder on Earth
The spacecraft Cassini first arrived at Saturn in 2004 and collected data until it purposefully crashed into the planet’s atmosphere in 2017.

Concept:

What is Saturn Rings?

Saturn’s rings are thought to be pieces of comets, asteroids, or shattered moons that broke up before they reached the planet, torn apart by Saturn’s powerful gravity
They are made of billions of small chunks of ice and rock coated with other materials such as dust
The ring particles mostly range from tiny, dust-sized icy grains to chunks as big as a house. A few particles are as large as mountains.
The rings would look mostly white if you looked at them from the cloud tops of Saturn, and interestingly, each ring orbits at a different speed around the planet.

Additional Information:

Saturn is made mostly of hydrogen and helium.
At Saturn’s center is a dense core of metals like iron and nickel surrounded by rocky material and other compounds solidified by intense pressure and heat.
It is enveloped by liquid metallic hydrogen inside a layer of liquid hydrogen
Saturn is the only planet in our solar system with an average density that is less than water.
As a gas giant, Saturn doesn’t have a true surface. The planet is mostly swirling gases and liquids deeper down