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Saturn's Rings Could be Disappearing
fenimor writes "Saturn, the sixth planet from the Sun, is probably best known for its famous planetary rings. They extend from 6,630 km to 120,700 km above Saturn's equator, and are composed of silica rock, iron oxide, and ice particles. A massive eruption of atomic oxygen from Saturn's outer rings, seen by Cassini's ultraviolet camera, may be an indication that the planet's wispy E ring is eroding so fast that it could disappear within 100 million years if not replenished."
Whoa, we better get cracking on that one right away.
Canthros
Let's fill a space shuttle up with rocks and ice, and then send it out to Saturn and replenish the ring ourselves!
You undersestimate the finger pointing. Just wait a few hundred years the "Fight to save Saturns Rings" will go down in history as humanities folly, just like global warming.
I just want video footage of the neo-hippies getting sucked into Saturns Gravity well while holding hands and singing Kumbia. Oh the humanity...
--"Sorry for the inconvience." Gods Last Words to his Creation
DNA, So Long and Thanks for all the Fish
... that is, if the Americans don't start harvesting it to make ice cubes. Better yet... E Ring Bottled Water! Straight from the rings of Saturn... Makes Dasani seem kinda ... ordinary. :)
I'll fill up my ice-cube tray!
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
Yes this is a wicked Troll.
The evaporation of the Rings of Saturn are caused by Global Warming. We all *know* that Global Warming is caused by American vehicles.
Therefore, the United Nations should take immediate action and pass a bunch of "resolutions" sternly warning those bastard Americans that they are ruining the beauty of Saturn's Rings and will be in Real Big Trouble Any Time Now.
Only then will the Rings be saved.
First of all, 100 million years is a pretty long time, even by planet standards. Second, the E-ring is easily one of the most tenuous of the rings. (You've never seen it through a telescope, for example.) The A, B, and C rings, the ones you've seen, are a lot denser. It's not clear if they're disappearing, and if so, how long they'd last. In fact, if you get past the sensational leader paragraph, you discover that it is far from clear that the oxygen even came from the E-ring.
Actually, whoever wrote that article didn't really check the facts all that well. A quick check would have shown that the E-ring only starts at 180,000 km from the planet's center (that's 120,000 km from the "surface"). It extends out another 300,000 km, so this isn't a totally trivial point. Also, the UVIS instrument, fantastic though it is, hasn't discovered all of the things that they claim it did. Most of those observations were made in the visible wavelengths. And were discovered by, er, Voyager. I mean, I hate to be nitpicky on the one hand, but is it so much to ask for people to try to keep the facts straight?
I strongly doubt that any process that replenishes the rings would be applicable to replenishing the ozone layer. For one thing, the ozone layer is chemistry in action, the rings are much more simple physics. (Blasting particles off of a moon has little to do with producing O3 molecules on Earth.)
More important, you need to point out to me where the blurb suggests that humans should replenish the rings. "Replenish" doesn't really imply that humans need to be involved. Any attempt to read that statement as saying that the means need to be artificial says more about your than about how you read things than the person who wrote it.
Millennia? Unlikely. Millions of years would be more in line with the research. (Actually, the dynamical lifetimes of Saturnian rings can be upwards of 100 million years.)
Rings aren't really what I'd call "turbulent". Collisions speeds are very, very small. Eccentricities are practically non-existant by planetary standards. Things are pretty orderly, on the whole.
Worse, Larry Esposito (the real head of the UVIS team, despite what the article indicates) has floated the idea that rings might recycle themselves. It's a good idea, and his initial (crude) models indicate ring ages that are much too long. So it's not wholly clear that rings can't be primordial.
Still, the concensus remains that rings probably aren't an original feature of the solar system and that there is a source of ringy-goodness somewhere in the systems. So you're probably right overall: replenishment is likely occuring.
On an seperate note, what does the formation of icey planetesimals from the protosolar disk have to do with ring ages?