All Things Saturn

New research from NASA has found that Saturn may be losing its iconic rings faster than the agency was expecting.

Scientists are warning that the rings have less than 100 million years to live because the rings are being pulled into Saturn by gravity as a dusty rain of ice particles, or “ring rain.”

This “ring rain” drains enough water out of Saturn’s rings to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool every half hour.

“From this alone, the entire ring system will be gone in 300 million years, but add to this the Cassini-spacecraft measured ring-material detected falling into Saturn’s equator, and the rings have less than 100 million years to live,” said James O’Donoghue of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in a news release. “This is relatively short, compared to Saturn’s age of over four billion years.”

The video above explains how Saturn is losing its rings, and what this reveals about the planet’s history.

NASA is still trying to learn the origin of the planet’s rings -- if the planet was created with rings, or got them later in life. The new research suggests that Saturn got its rings later in life, because the rings are less than 100 million years old.

“We are lucky to be around to see Saturn’s ring system, which appears to be in the middle of its lifetime," O’Donoghue said in a news release. “However, if rings are temporary, perhaps we just missed out on seeing giant ring systems of Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, which have only thin ringlets today.”