Saturn’s rings and moons claimed to be 4 b years old
US: The dazzling rings of Saturn and its moons are likely to
be more than 4 billion years old, scientists have claimed. The finding
comes after a new study of observations from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft
orbiting Saturn, which suggests that the planet’s rings and moons formed
at the same time as the rest of the solar system’s planetary bodies soon
after the sun sparked into life.
Since Saturn’s rings and moons formed from the same planetary nebula
of gas and dust around the early sun that led to the solar system’s
other planets, they are a time capsule of sorts for astronomers, the
researchers said.
“Studying the Saturnian system helps us understand the chemical and
physical evolution of our entire solar system,” Fox News quoted Cassini
scientist Gianrico Filacchione, of Italy’s National Institute for
Astrophysics in Rome, as saying.
“We know now that understanding this evolution requires not just
studying a single moon or ring, but piecing together the relationships
intertwining these bodies,” Filacchione said.
Filacchione and his colleagues analyzed data from Cassini’s visual
and infrared mapping spectrometer, or VIMS, to understand the
distribution of water ice and colors across Saturn’s rings and moons.
Different colors in the rings and moons provide evidence of non-water
organic materials, while water ice is a vital clue into the timeline
that led to the formation of the Saturnian system, the researchers said.
Observations from VIMS showed that there is too much water ice in the
Saturn system to have been dumped there by comets or other more recent
means, leading the researchers to conclude that the water ice must have
formed around the time the solar system did.
The researchers also discovered that the surfaces of Saturn’s moons
typically get redder the farther away they orbit the huge planet.
Some of these outer moons, like Hyperion and Iapetus, may have been
coated with reddish dust shed by Phoebe, a small, retrograde moon
believed to have originated in the Kuiper Belt, the researchers said.
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