Scientists Disagree About Age of Rings

New research based on data from NASA’s Cassini probe makes the rings billions of years younger.

Saturn’s characteristic system of rings make astronomers, who do not know how the rings formed or how old they are, disagree.

The eight rings consist of dirty lumps of ice of all sizes, from dust particles to mountains. So far, most scientists believed that the rings are remains from the planet’s birth that were not absorbed by Saturn. So, the rings must be as old as the planet itself, i.e. about 4.4 billion years. But new analyses of 10-year-old observations from NASA’s Cassini probe show that at least one ring consists of material that is only 15-90 million years old. If that is correct, the rings cannot possibly be remains from the birth.