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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.
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
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.
What does this even mean, in this context?
I mean, apart from external realities causing science to lose it characteristic dispassion?
Wow, I'm so concerned.
Wait... it's not that Saturn right...?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
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)
Are there really people here genuinely concerned about the rings being “lost”?