Logo

The scientists in the United States have carried out a study, using data collected by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, and found that rather than being formed 100 million years ago, the rings are created when the solar system was under construction, the 'ScienceDaily' has reported.

Data from NASA's Voyager spacecraft in the 1970s and later the Hubble Space Telescope led the scientists to believe that Saturn's rings were relatively young and likely created by a comet that shattered a large moon.

"Ring features seen by instruments on Cassini -- which arrived at Saturn in 2004 -- indicate the rings are not formed by a single cataclysmic event. The ages of the different rings appear to vary significantly and the ring material is being continually recycled."

The evidence is consistent with the picture that Saturn has had rings all through its history. We see extensive, rapid recycling of ring material, in which moons are continually shattered into ring particles, which then gather together and re-form moons.

Scientists had previously believed rings as old as Saturn itself should be darker due to ongoing pollution by the "infall" of meteoric dust, leaving telltale spectral signatures, Esposito said.

But the new Cassini observations indicate the churning mass of ice and rock within Saturn's gigantic ring system is likely much larger than previously estimated, helping to explain why the rings appear relatively bright to ground-based telescopes and spacecraft. " Esposito, who discovered Saturn's faint F ring in 1979 using data from NASA's Pioneer 11 spacecraft, said an upcoming paper by him and colleagues in the 'Icarus' journal supports the theory that Saturn's ring material is being recycled.

Observing the flickering of starlight passing through the rings in a process known as stellar occultation, the researchers discovered 13 objects in the F ring ranging in size from 30 yards to six miles across.

Since most of the objects were translucent -- indicating at least some starlight was passing through them -- the researchers concluded they "probably are temporary clumps of icy boulders that are continually collecting and disbanding due to the competing processes of shattering and coming together again".