Age of Saturn's rings revealed

[tlongII]

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/01/02/age-saturn-rings-revealed/?intcmp=features

http://a57.foxnews.com/global.fncstatic.com/static/managed/img/fn2/feeds/Space.com/660/371/cassini-saturn-rings-mosaic-enhanced.jpg?ve=1&tl=1

SAN FRANCISCO – Saturn's iconic rings likely formed about 4.4 billion years ago, shortly after the planet itself took shape, a new study suggests.

The origin of Saturn's ring system has long been the subject of debate, with some researchers arguing that it's a relatively young structure and others holding that it coalesced long ago, at roughly the same time as the gas giant's many satellites.

The new study, conducted using data gathered by NASA's Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft, strongly supports the latter scenario, researchers said Dec. 10 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. [Photos: Saturn's Glorious Rings Up Close]

Cassini's measurements imply that "the main rings would be [extremely] old, rather than hundreds of millions of years old," Sascha Kempf, of the University of Colorado in Boulder, said.

Saturn's main ring system is huge but razor-thin, measuring about 175,000 miles across but just 33 feet or so in the vertical direction. The rings are composed primarily of water ice, but they contain small amounts of rocky material contributed by micrometeoroid bombardment.

Kempf and his colleagues used Cassini's Cosmic Dust Analyzer instrument to measure just how frequently such tiny particles cruise through the Saturn system.

They found that a surprisingly small amount of dusty material comes into contact with the rings. On average, just 0.0000000000000000001 grams — or, in scientific notation, 10-19 g — of dust per square centimeter zooms through space every second at a distance of five to 50 Saturn radii from the planet.

Having measured this low rate of dust recruitment, the team then calculated that the rings have likely existed for about 4.4 billion years.

"It would be consistent with an old ring system," Kempf said.

Kempf and his colleagues were also able to reconstruct the orbits of many of these particles, finding that the lion's share likely come from the Kuiper Belt, the ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune's orbit. However, some of the dust probably hails from the even more distant Oort Cloud and some from interstellar space, Kempf said.

That makes the Saturn-area dust quite different from the stuff seen near Earth and other parts of the inner solar system — a situation caused by Jupiter and its huge gravitational pull.

"Jupiter is basically splitting the solar system with respect to the dust into an inner and an outer system," Kempf said.

The $3.2 billion Cassini mission launched in 1997 and reached Saturn in 2004. The mission's operations have been extended through 2017, when the spacecraft will end its life with a dramatic plunge into Saturn's atmosphere.

[TDMVPDPOY]

more bullshit sugarcoating for funds...

[Koolaid_Man]

more bullshit sugarcoating for funds...

are you a red neck? it's all legit son...we have to explore space or else we're doomed...we have to harness dark energy or we'll never leave this planet..I just finished watching the latest Superman movie and until we stop using chemical fuel to travel we're doomed....dark energy is our only hope

[Wild Cobra]

more bullshit sugarcoating for funds...
No kidding.

They treat their speculation as ground breaking facts.

[lefty]

Bifrost bridge imo

[Fillmoe]

but they lord yeezus christ said the world/universe is only 5000 years old.

[mouse]

Saturn's iconic rings likely formed about 4.4 billion years ago, shortly after the planet itself took shape, a new study suggests.

kids with Autism? sorry, your not a priority.... we need to know about Saturn.
Saturn's Rings contradict the age of the Universe. In fact NASA said the complete opposite a few years back
An international team of scientists (French, US and Canadian) using the Hubble Space Telescope have shown that the innermost rings are losing water ‘relatively rapidly’. Indeed, the water is disappearing ‘so fast’, the team believes that it would all have gone already if the rings were more than about 30 million years old.

RINGS ARE STILL THERE?

For decades astronomers have thought that the rings were old. This notion was challenged when NASA's Voyager spacecraft flew by the ringed giant in the early 1980s and gathered data on the planet, its many moons and its ring system. Through the Voyager observations, scientists found that complex processes were going on in the rings that make it very hard to understand how [the rings] could be that old.

These processes involve the gravitational pushes and pulls that Saturn's moons and rings exert on each other. These processes should push Saturn's small moons out of the ring system and pull the rings in toward the planet. But if the ring system was as old, this should have happened long ago.

"The processes are going so fast that they would be all finished — the rings would be gone," said Larry Esposito of the Universityof Coloradoat Boulder, the principal investigator of Cassini's Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) instrument.

When Cassini arrived at Saturn in 2004, its observations showed that the processes churning up the rings were going at an even faster rate than was indicated by the Voyager data, Adjusting the age of the rings accordingly would make them younger than the Voyager exploration era. This would show that Saturn is not winding down; meaning it is extremely young.

It seems Scientist get to lie to us every year spend billions of dollars on bullshit projects and can't even figure out a cure for the common cold.

[Viva Las Espuelas]

I can't wait to see Uranus rings :D

[mouse]

I can't wait to see Uranus rings :D

You first have to get past the debris field.

dQuqAtVNnwY

[RandomGuy]

more bullshit sugarcoating for funds...

Not sure what you mean by sugarcoating for funds, but I would point out the cost of this decade+ scientific mission clocks in at about what Americans spend in one year on pet vitamins.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/these-4-charts-explain-exactly-how-americans-spend-52-billion-on-our-pets-in-a-year/273446/

[RandomGuy]

kids with Autism? sorry, your not a priority.... we need to know about Saturn.
Saturn's Rings contradict the age of the Universe. In fact NASA said the complete opposite a few years back
An international team of scientists (French, US and Canadian) using the Hubble Space Telescope have shown that the innermost rings are losing water ‘relatively rapidly’. Indeed, the water is disappearing ‘so fast’, the team believes that it would all have gone already if the rings were more than about 30 million years old.

RINGS ARE STILL THERE?

For decades astronomers have thought that the rings were old. This notion was challenged when NASA's Voyager spacecraft flew by the ringed giant in the early 1980s and gathered data on the planet, its many moons and its ring system. Through the Voyager observations, scientists found that complex processes were going on in the rings that make it very hard to understand how [the rings] could be that old.

These processes involve the gravitational pushes and pulls that Saturn's moons and rings exert on each other. These processes should push Saturn's small moons out of the ring system and pull the rings in toward the planet. But if the ring system was as old, this should have happened long ago.

"The processes are going so fast that they would be all finished — the rings would be gone," said Larry Esposito of the Universityof Coloradoat Boulder, the principal investigator of Cassini's Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) instrument.

When Cassini arrived at Saturn in 2004, its observations showed that the processes churning up the rings were going at an even faster rate than was indicated by the Voyager data, Adjusting the age of the rings accordingly would make them younger than the Voyager exploration era. This would show that Saturn is not winding down; meaning it is extremely young.

It seems Scientist get to lie to us every year spend billions of dollars on bullshit projects and can't even figure out a cure for the common cold.

Jeez, you are predictable.

Science is an iterative, cumulative process.

Gather data, refine theories. The more and better data one has, the better the theory. Hubbles observations were based on earth orbit data, and Cassini was very specifically designed to do far more than Hubble could ever do, and got closer to do it.

[mouse]

Not sure what you mean by sugarcoating for funds, but I would point out the cost of this decade+ scientific mission clocks in at about what Americans spend in one year on pet vitamins.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/these-4-charts-explain-exactly-how-americans-spend-52-billion-on-our-pets-in-a-year/273446/

And out of those two which did Americans benefit from?

So according to your thought process it's ok we spend 100 Trillion on the war in Iraq as long as we spend the same amount on Bottle water?

[mouse]

Jeez, you are predictable.

Science is an iterative, cumulative process.

Gather data, refine theories. The more and better data one has, the better the theory. Hubbles observations were based on earth orbit data, and Cassini was very specifically designed to do far more than Hubble could ever do, and got closer to do it.

Jeez, you are predictable.

I don't give a rats ass if Science wants to keep second guessing themselves good for them they found another moon orbiting Jupiter...they can be learning everyday just take the bullshit lies out of the school textbooks they are not facts.

[TDMVPDPOY]

hey mouse if u look up into the night sky, remove the stars and whatever in the night sky....has scientist work out how old the night sky is or whatever it is the night sky is made out of that harbors the stars and planets?

do you believe universe is flat or a sphere?

[Venti Quattro]

Surely they're younger than Avante...

[RandomGuy]

And out of those two which did Americans benefit from?

So according to your thought process it's ok we spend 100 Trillion on the war in Iraq as long as we spend the same amount on Bottle water?

You would be a lot easier to respond to, if your thoughts were expressed coherently. No offense.

[mouse]

hey mouse if u look up into the night sky, remove the stars and whatever in the night sky....has scientist work out how old the night sky is or whatever it is the night sky is made out of that harbors the stars and planets?

do you believe universe is flat or a sphere?

Not sure what point you want to make and I have not researched any "what if" type scenarios.

But I guess i could give you an off the record answer when I am not at work and after a few rolling rocks.

The one thing I do know is what i see printed in a book. If you go get any science or Biology book you will see time after time Science makes outlandish claims of how they know exactly when and how the universe was formed and life came about and then they all of a sudden get to move the goalposts?

If only Science would spend 1% of the money wasted on unnecessary space adventures and edit the textbooks.

How would you like to a Doctor to say your cancer free then a day later tell you they was wrong you can't detect cancer with a urine sample. Wouldn't you expect them to rewrite the medical journals? Wouldn't you like to know or not if you have a life threatening disease or would you just be happy guessing?

If a mechanic at the dealership F_cked up your new car because the book said to use a part that your car doesn't use wouldn't you expect them to "correct" the book?

Why shoud school books be any different?

I do know one thing for sure......if a creationists was to say "oh we just found out Noah had two arks after all' there would not only be a massive uproar and a huge humiliation wave from all the Atheists there would also be a national outcry to rewrite the Bible immediately.

I just want both sides to be fair and stop deceiving others why is that so hard for people to comprehend?

[mouse]

You would be a lot easier to respond to, if your thoughts were expressed coherently. No offense.



Translation: If only you was just as easy to debate with like the other low IQ posters on ST I would look smarter.