"Right now we only have one very wide estimate," O'Donoghue told on Wednesday (April 26). But the rate at which the ring material is raining onto the planet is still largely uncertain the rings could disappear as quickly as 100 million years, or they might hang around for 1.1 billion years, astronomers say. Although that may seem like a long time away, the deluge is leading the symbolic ring system to " a relatively quick death" in cosmic timescales. For example, data sent home from NASA's Cassini spacecraft - which cruised right through the gap between Saturn and its rings 22 times during its death dive into the planet in 2017 - had revealed that somewhere between 880 pounds (400 kg) and 6,000 pounds (2,800 kg) of icy rain is flowing onto the planet every second and heating its upper atmosphere.Īt this rate, the rings might vanish in about 300 million years. The telescopes will help monitor how the "ring rain" phenomenon fluctuates during one full season on the gas giant, which lasts about seven Earth-years thanks to its orbit far away from the sun.Īstronomers expect interesting data from the campaign, as previous research showed that huge amounts of ring material is constantly dropping onto Saturn. To better estimate the lifetime of Saturn's iconic rings, JWST and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii will be part of a long-term observation campaign to study the planet.
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