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Saturn's Rings Are Disappearing At a 'Worst-Case Scenario' Rate, NASA Says (usatoday.com)
A new study published in the journal Icarus found that Saturn is losing its signature rings at a "worst-case scenario" rate, and the bands could disappear completely within 100 million years. USA Today reports: The rings are being pulled into the planet "by gravity as a dusty rain of ice particles under the influence of Saturn's magnetic field," NASA said. The phenomenon is called "ring rain," and it drains enough water from rings to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool every 30 minutes, 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," O'Donoghue said in a statement. "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. We are lucky to be around to see Saturn's ring system, which appears to be in the middle of its lifetime."
Here's a fun game. Go out on the street and ask 30 random people what could be causing Saturn's rings to slowly dissapear. But first take a guess what the number one answer will be.
I propose a sequel to Wall-E, where humanity realizes Saturns rings are almost gone - but saves the day by replacing missing ring-ice with plastic floating in the oceans of Earth!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We'll build bid, fat, beautiful new rings. They'll go up so fast your head will spin!
And Enceladus will pay for it!
.. I'm sure some new tax will be invented to Save the Rings of the Evil of Mankind
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
That’s all right. Now that we have a Space Force, we could probably go and make sure someone holds the rings in place so that our children 100 million years down the line can look at circular crap floating through space.
It means the Ace Rimmers across the multitudinous universes are living longer, on average - so the orbital decay of their coffins is happening more frequently than new coffins are arriving.
#DeleteChrome
accretion disks DO NOT condense into discrete well-defined orbital bodies like planets (or in this case, moons)
Planetary rings are not accretion disks. So your statement is already wrong from the first two words. Even so, there is evidence that some of Saturn's moons were formed partially out of condensed ring material.
the Big Bang theory as a simple explanation of everything we see.
The Big Bang theory has little to do with ring mechanics. Maxwell already had a comprehensive model of how the rings worked (based on Newtonian physics) 70 years before Lemaitre posed the idea of a Big Bang.
Seriously. You want to know what is truly to blame for people willfully ignoring climate change? Science journalism. When I see articles like this, that talk about an interesting observation of an astronomical phenomenon in the same way that the National Emergency Broadcasting System talks about impending thermonuclear annihilation, it makes me jaded to articles about things that actually affect me or more importantly, things that I affect. It isn't the fault nor really the responsibility of scientists to prevent their discoveries from falling in the hands of hacks, but it is BeauHD's fucking job to keep clickbait bullshit off the front page of Slashdot.
It appears that the global warming is truly global, affecting Saturn's rings.
What does this even mean, in this context?
I mean, apart from external realities causing science to lose it characteristic dispassion?
So basically you shouldnt worry too much about what happens 100 million years ago, civilization will not last 100 thousand XD
Wow, I'm so concerned.
Evolution is fixed rate.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
More likely it's just the shit in your ears.
Don't let the mere fact that some of Saturn's rings have already coalesced into moons/moonlets, and never mind that a SINGLE SOLITARY end to ALL MATTER in ALL RINGS is the stupidest idea yet... planetary accretion discs and what is essentially a rubble disc around a planet are two very different things, being acted on different events, and in different environments. This isn't a one-or-the-other scenario. If you weren't trying so hard to disprove ALL physics for your own, childish, bullshit, brain dead reasons, you might sit back and take a science thread off once in a while from your anti-reality, anti-physics crusade.
The biggest problem here is... you assume you're intelligent; you're not.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Got anything better to do than post irrelevant things about stuff beyond you?
Be like Strax.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You're the potato one
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
accretion disks DO NOT condense into discrete well-defined orbital bodies like planets (or in this case, moons)?/quote.
Uh, this disk of material is doing a pretty good job of condensing into a planet: Saturn. Some moons gained material too, but otherwise it is doing a pretty good job of accumulating into a single large body. Given that most of the rings are within the fluid Roche limit, it is pretty well in line with current theories that moons would struggle to form but also not lose what they've already accumulated.
This is pretty cool.
This is a planetary feature which happens to exist within the time we are capable of seeing an knowing about them.
They'll come and go, have their own life cycle, and eventually go away.
That a bunch of monkeys on a boring rock in a corner of the galaxy floating in a vast universe can be aware of other planets in our solar system (or outside of it), know they have features like rings, send probes to look at them, and calculate that in 100 million years they'll be gone ... I find that pretty awesome, in the literal sense of the world.
We think of planets and the solar system and galaxies as these fixed, static systems which never change.
In reality, they're massively complex systems, which ebb and flow, wear out, fall apart, get made all over again. Over long scales, everything is in constant process of change.
There's no real human impact here, and the timeline is so crazy it's doubtful humans will still be around ... but that we can know this is happening around us is the kind of thing that just makes me happy to be alive to know about.
Science is cool, knowing what the universe around us doing, what it's made of, and in part how it got that way ... that's really amazing to me.
Why is it a "worst" case scenario? Why not a best case scenario? Saturn will lose those freakish rings and will soon morph into a normal round planet like everyone else. It can be proud of its body for once.
I thought the Big Bang Theory was about the blonde chick and the nerds?
That's the ticket.
The Cassini probe May have disrupted the delicate balance of the rings when it flew by. That butterfly's effect of gravity cascaded into all the rings collapsing into the planet. We should just stay home?
Wait... it's not that Saturn right...?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I'm more expecting the conspiracy nuts to say that this is all fake and that the scientists only fabricate it so they can somehow destroy our murrican way of life.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
the rings have less than 100 million years to live
With the incredible rate of advancement of technology, we'll probably blow them up long before then!
... but, frankly, when they are gone, I doubt anyone will miss them. In fact, I doubt anyone will even realize they were there in the first place. Like glaciers, or the gulf stream, or fish, ...
I feel like this significantly informs the theories of how the rings formed. If they are being lost this quickly, it would seem to disprove theories that have them being formed in the early solar system, and suggest a more recent cause.
"It's fairly slow, though."
From the Slashdot story: "... could disappear completely within 100 million years..."
Does anyone mind if I worry about that tomorrow?
That's funny.
It *is* an apt analogy, however.
all of the plastic in earth's oceans wouldn't replace even one *millionth* of Saturn's rings
Aha, you are talking about all the plastic now - remember this is Wall-E FanFic, set in a distant time after much plastic has had time to accumulate, and the citizens showed a propensity for leaving crap outside!
An interesting technical exercise - would all of the hydrocarbons on Earth manage to produce enough plastic to make a dent in replacing Saturn's rings?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We're lucky to live in the 400 or 500 million year window when Saturn's rings are spectacular huh? I think we're also lucky to live in a time when we get those nice solar eclipses. Our moon used to be closer, probably blotted out too much of the sun, and someday it'll be further away, only annular eclipses.
Truly, these are the best of times. Unless of course, Wolf-Rayet 104 blasts off or Yellowstone erupts or ...
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
By the way, this person's answer is also correct:
> They aren't disappearing it just appears they are due to Saturn's rings angle compared to the earth making most telescopes unable to see the rings.
In a few years, we won't be able to see the rings of Saturn because we'd be looking at them from the edge. if you want to see them, or want your kids to see them, now is the time to do so.
In 100 millions years we will most likely have destroyed earth, either killing ourselves off, or spreading like a plague throughout the galaxy. Either way, Saturn's rings wont matter.
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
Oh, no. I read that wrong. It's 100 million years. I guess I don't have to hurry up to get my space passport renewed after all.
Oh no a "Worst-case Scenario" is happening! How will I be able to go about my daily business now?!
I love when people use numbers that appear big, except when compared to *really* big numbers.
...it drains enough water from rings to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool every 30 minutes...
OH NO! Except...
... the entire ring system will be gone in 300 million years...
300,000,000 years * 365 days * 48 half-hours in a day = 5,256,000,000,000. So there are 5.256 TRILLION swimming pools worth of water up there. I'm not going to lay awake tonight worrying about this.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Take your straw man back to the gun club, people are interested in science here.
Why would 'science' look at the changes in Saturn's rings as a 'worst case scenario"? Scientifically, there is nothing inherently bad (or good) about the normal course of planetary evolution. It is what it is. We can study it, explain it, but the headline is anything but scientific in nature.
The cause/source of the rings is still unknown. Thus, how do they know they'll disappear if the source is not known? The cause/source may replenish the rings.
While a one-time collision is one possible cause, periodic ice-burping by a moon or two may also be the source.
One interesting theory is that periodically a pair of moons get too close to each other, heat each other up, melt their cores, burp water/ice, swap orbits, and then drift into normal orbits for a while again. (Sounds like my marriage.)
Table-ized A.I.
And we're unlucky to have missed Jupiter's rings, which were far more impressive.