Until now it was thought that Saturn’s rings had not formed with the planet, but were much younger than it, but now new research suggests that they could be much older than they appear thanks to their resistance.
The details of the research, led by scientists from the Japanese space agency (JAXA), the University of Tokyo (Japan) and the French CNRS, were published this Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
The claim that Saturn’s rings could be as old as the planet itself is a hypothesis that challenges all estimates made so far about its age.
For more than 400 years, these rings have fascinated astronomers.
In 1610, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei first observed them through a telescope, but he did not know what they were, and in the 19th century, James Clerk Maxwell, a Scottish scientist, concluded that Saturn’s rings could not be solid, but were made up of many individual pieces.
Today, Saturn is known to host seven rings composed of countless chunks of ice that extend almost 281,600 kilometers from the planet’s surface.
For most of the 20th century, scientists assumed that the rings had formed at the same time as Saturn, about 4.5 billion years ago, and that impacts with traveling micrometeoroids (rocky debris smaller than a grain of sand) through space, they had dirty and darkened the ice particles that make them up.
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The years do not pass through the rings of Saturn
But in 2004, the Cassini spacecraft observed that Saturn’s rings looked relatively bright and clean up close. With the data provided by this mission, estimates of the age of the rings were refined: the first studies set their age between ten and one hundred million years, and the latest research at 400 million years.
To try to better determine its age, Ryuki Hyodo and his colleagues used computer models to simulate collisions between micrometeoroids and icy ring particles.
Thus, they verified that high-speed impacts can cause the vaporization of micrometeoroids and that the vapor expands, cools and condenses in Saturn’s magnetic field to form charged nanoparticles and ions, the study explains.
Simulations by Hyodo and his colleagues revealed that these charged particles collide with Saturn, are dragged into its atmosphere or completely escape the planet’s gravitational pull, so very little of this material is deposited in the rings, which remain in place. relatively clean conditions.
The scientific team believes that these low levels of contamination could have misled astronomers for decades, meaning that Saturn’s rings could actually be billions of years old and maintain a “more youthful” appearance.
Although more research is needed, the authors suggest that this process could also be occurring in the rings of Uranus and Neptune, as well as on icy moons around giant planets.
With information from EFE.
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