One of the unknowns of our galactic neighborhood that gives astronomers the most headache is trying to explain the delicate balance that sustains the rings of Saturn. And not only that, but how it came to have them and since when.
Some scientists think that they arose at the same time as our solar system and that, like the asteroid belt, it is the remains of one or more moons that did not form. However, others believe that they are about a hundred million years old and that they appeared after the destruction of a small satellite that at some point orbited the gas giant.
Older than the cosmos itself?
Wing-Huen Ip, an expert in space science at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (Germany), has studied the latter hypothesis in depth. According to his calculations, the combined mass of the rings implies that this hypothetical body must have had a diameter of at least 100 km – small if we compare it with that of the Moon , of 3,470 km. Thus, it is not daring to think that it could have been annihilated by the collision with a comet.
However, there is a problem: if it had been the case, the time taken for the rings to form would be 30 billion years, twice the age of the universe. After analyzing images taken by Voyager probes in the 1980s, a team of scientists from NASA’s Ames Research Center found that the micrometeoroids that form the rings are covered by a thin layer of ice. Analysis of their brightness and the way in which they have been blackening suggests that, indeed, they must have originated about a hundred million years ago, although the debate continues.
