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Saturn ’s rings could be billions of year old despite not looking a day over a few hundred million , a new field of study has receive .
The ringing ofSaturnare one of oursolar system ’s greatest wonder ; made up of million , if not trillions , of chunks of water chicken feed which can be smaller than a caryopsis of sand and larger than a mountain , according toNASA . However , they ’re also a bit of an brain-teaser .
Illustration of NASA’s Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn.
research worker have beendebatingthe origins and eld of Saturn ’s pack for decade . Some scientist fence that the rings take shape as recently as 100 million years ago — when dinosaurs still roll our planet — after Saturn ’s gravitative wrench tore aside a passing comet or gelid moonlight .
One of the reasons scientist believe the rings were so untested is that they come out very clear — in the context of planetary band , this think that the icy ball from which they are form have n’t been grime up by collisions with tiny outer space rocks call micrometeoroids over billions of years . However , a new study publish Dec. 16 in the journalNature Geosciencesuggests that micrometeoroids would n’t in reality stick to the ring , so they may expect younger than they really are .
" A unclouded appearance does not necessarily think of the ring are young , " study tip authorRyuki Hyodo , a planetary scientist at the Institute of Science Tokyo , told Live Science ’s sister siteSpace.com .
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The raw study suggests that the rings could have formed too soon in the solar system ’s chronicle , around 4.5 billion to 4 billion eld ago , when , accord to Hyodo , thesolar systemwas a lot more chaotic .
" Many large planetal bodies were still migrating and interacting , greatly increase the chances of a meaning effect that could have led to the formation of Saturn ’s ring , " he said .
To see more about the band , Hyodo ’s team used data processor modeling to run simulations of micrometeoroid strikes . These simulation determined that the micrometeoroids would hit the rings at a high enough speed to be vaporized , reaching a top temperature of almost 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit ( 10,000 degrees Celsius ) , accord to the study . In other words , no solid cloth would be implanted in the rings .
Additional pretense suggested that vapor from the micrometeoroids would extend , cool and then form charged nanoparticles and ions , which would clash with Saturn , get away its gravity or get drag in into the planet ’s atmosphere . Either fashion , the rings would be left squeaky clean and retain a comparatively young visual aspect .
However , the public debate over the age of the doughnut is potential to keep on . Sascha Kempf , an associate professor of aperient at the University of Colorado Boulder who top a 2023studysuggesting that Saturn ’s annulus are no older than 400 million years old , is n’t convinced by the unexampled finding .
Kempftold the New Scientistthat his squad used a more complex method acting for estimating years that swear on more than just band befoulment efficiency and let in the fourth dimension it read for material to arrive and evaporate .
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" We are pretty certain that this is not really telling us that we have to go back to the drafting board , " Kempf sound out .
Lotfi Ben - Jaffel , a researcher at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics in France who was n’t involved in either study , tell New Scientist that the new research suggests the rings are older than has been claimed in recent years but added that Hyodo ’s squad still needs to improve their moulding to give a more precise age approximation .
" It represent a positive step toward the absent modeling endeavor required to decently do by the primal problem of the formation and organic evolution of a planetary ring scheme , " Ben - Jaffel allege .
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