Saturn's rings revealed to be 4.4 billion years old

Saturn's iconic rings likely formed about 4.4 billion years ago, shortly after the planet itself took shape, researchers say.

The origin of Saturn's ring system has long been the subject of debate, with some researchers arguing that it's a relatively young structure and others holding that it coalesced long ago, at roughly the same time as the gas giant's many satellites.

At the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, researchers said that the new study, which was conducted using data gathered by NASA's Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft, strongly supports the latter scenario.

Cassini's measurements imply that "the main rings would be [extremely] old, rather than hundreds of millions of years old," Fox News quoted Sascha Kempf, of the University of Colorado in Boulder, as saying.

Saturn's main ring system is huge but razor-thin, measuring about 175,000 miles across but just 33 feet or so in the vertical direction. The rings are composed primarily of water ice, but they contain small amounts of rocky material contributed by micrometeoroid bombardment.

Kempf and his colleagues used Cassini's Cosmic Dust Analyzer instrument to measure just how frequently such tiny particles cruise through the Saturn system.

They found that a surprisingly small amount of dusty material comes into contact with the rings. On an average, just 10-19 g of dust per square centimeter zooms through space every second at a distance of five to 50 Saturn radii from the planet.

Having measured this low rate of dust recruitment, the team then calculated that the rings have likely existed for about 4.4 billion years.

Kempf and his colleagues were also able to reconstruct the orbits of many of these particles, finding that the lion's share likely come from the Kuiper Belt, the ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune's orbit.

However, some of the dust probably hails from the even more distant Oort Cloud and some from interstellar space, Kempf said.