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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."
Global warming?
We'll build bid, fat, beautiful new rings. They'll go up so fast your head will spin!
And Enceladus will pay for it!
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.
Did anyone ask you to be?
Since when was astronomy or astrophysics about your feelings?
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)
Wait... it's not that Saturn right...?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
At what point in your thought process did you think "slashdot will surely understand this better if I use a sports-based metaphor"?