Data from the Cassini spacecraft suggested the rings are bright and clean, as if only 100 to 400 million years old. Saturn itself is 4.5 billion years old. Other scientists argue the rings could be ancient and simply stay clean.
Truth label: Debated. Serious people disagree. You get both sides.
Go deeper
The young camp
Dust from space should darken ice over time. The rings look too fresh to be billions of years old.
The old camp
Some models suggest impacts might not leave as much dirt behind as assumed.
Learn
- Rings are vanishing. Ice slowly rains down onto Saturn. The rings may be gone in a few hundred million years.
Test yourself
Which spacecraft studied Saturn's rings up close?
Cassini. Cassini orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017.
Sources
Swipe more like this
CurioUS is a feed you steer. Pick what you're curious about and every swipe tunes what comes next.
Open this card in the appMore from Space & Time
- A day on Venus is longer than its year.
- The light from Andromeda left before humans existed.
- A spacecraft launched in 1977 is still sending messages from interstellar space.
- A teaspoon of neutron star would weigh about a billion tonnes.
- The calcium in your bones was made inside a star.
- Mars has a volcano almost three times taller than Everest.