Age Of Saturn's C Ring Discovered By Scientists Through Its Dust

Scientists have discovered that Saturn's C ring has not really been there for too long like they have previously believed.

The Christian Science Monitor reported that scientists from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, studied the dust on the planet's rings and found out that Saturn's C ring has not collected enough to prove that it has been there for more than a hundred million years. Using the data gathered by NASA through its Cassini mission, the researchers observed the dust collected by the said ring to discover how long it has been present.

Saturn's rings may be made of thin icy layers, but "it is the small fraction of non-icy material - the dust the ring collects - that is valuable for clues about the ring's origin and age," said study's lead author, doctoral candidate Zhimeng Zhang, who is set to work at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab on the Juno spacecraft mission in January.

This space dust is also known as micrometeoroids, which come from the Kuiper Belt past another planet Neptune, produce thermal emissions on Saturn's rings measured with the use of Cassini's microwave passive radiometer.

"We believe that the C ring has been continuously polluted by meteoroid bombardment since it first formed, and we think the middle C ring was further contaminated by an incoming Centaur, a rocky object torn apart by tides and ultimately broken into pieces and injected into the C ring," Zhang added, as reported by Phys.org.

Since Saturn's rings are made of icy layers, the scientists were able to detect that its C ring has low thermal emissions. This means that it does not contain as much dust compared to the others.

This study, which gave scientists the conclusion that the C ring may have been there for only 100 million years, will be published on Jan. 1, 2017 in the journal Icarus.