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Old 22-12-2017, 11:25 AM
gary
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Saturn's rings may be less than 200 million years old - Cassini analysis

In a Dec 12 article in Science, Paul Voosen writes on a report that
was made to the American Geophysical Union this month by
scientists who have been studying Cassini data.

The scientists have put forward the proposition that, based on two
sets of evidence, Saturn's rings may be under 200 million years old.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul Voosen, Science
The first line of evidence comes from the mass of the rings. For years, many scientists leaned toward a large mass, greater than that of Saturn’s moon Mimas, because of the opaque, dense appearance of Saturn’s primary ring, the B ring. Enough grist to form a massive ring could have only been supplied billions of years ago, when the early solar system was chock full of planetesimals.

But now, data gathered during five of Cassini’s final 22 passes before it plunged into the planet are bringing the mass of the B ring into focus, Luciano Iess, a planetary scientist at the Sapienza University of Rome, announced at the AGU meeting today. Iess leads Cassini’s radio experiment team, which used tiny Doppler shifts in the spacecraft’s radio signal to determine the mass of objects it orbited. When Cassini began threading the gap between Saturn and its rings during its last passes, the team could pick out the gravitational pull of the rings—and hence their mass. “The central value is consistently 0.4 Mimas’s mass,” Iess said. If theories that link mass to age are correct, he added, “This is a clear indication that the rings did not form together with Saturn.”
Full story here :-
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/...ervations-show
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