How many rings does saturn have

These planetary rings are massive enough that Galileo was able to see them using a simple telescope way back in , though it wasn't until half a century later that another scientist was able to figure out what the "arms" Galileo saw actually were. NASA has since called them "the most recognized characteristic of any world in our solar system. So how many rings does Saturn have, anyway?

If you can see them from your backyard , there must be a lot, right? Scientists don't know for sure exactly how many rings Saturn has. There are eight main, named ring groups that stretch across , miles , but there are far more than eight rings.

These systems are named with letters of the alphabet, in order of their discovery. Astronomers have known about ring groups A, B, and C since the 17th century , while others are newer discoveries. Cassini also carried a probe, called Huygens HOY-guns , that parachuted into the atmosphere of Saturn's giant moon Titan.

Huygens sent back amazing information and images from this strange world whose surface we have never seen. Cassini and Huygens made many exciting discoveries. In September , Cassini ended its mission with a planned plunge into Saturn's atmosphere. A view of Saturn's rings, as seen by the Cassini spacecraft. This series of photos was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope from through You can see how Saturn's rings seem to change, but it is only because our angle of view changes.

Why does Saturn have rings? What are Saturn's rings made of? There are actually many rings—maybe to Giant, boulder-size chunks of ice can be found throughout the rings. The crash came after a last few months of furious study, during which Cassini performed the Grand Finale — a sensational, death-defying dance that saw the spacecraft dive between the planet and its rings 22 times.

As new perspectives often do, this one revealed a surprise. But cosmic clues hidden deep within the rings caused some Cassini scientists to massively revise this figure. They emerged no more than million years ago, back when dinosaurs roamed Earth. He and other skeptics have pointed out that there are a lot of potential problems with the argument, from the physics of the ring pollution to the origins of the rings themselves. The rings were named alphabetically in the order they were discovered.

In response to the hypothesis, Crida co-authored a commentary for Nature Astronomy , published in September, that presented a litany of uncertainties. The dinosaurian age of the rings is an eye-catching claim, said Crida, but it circumvents an uncomfortable reality: Too many uncertainties exist to permit any firm estimate of the age of the rings.

Proponents of the younger age stand by their work. We know the age of the Earth because we can use the decay of radioactive matter in rocks to work out how old they are. Planetary geologists have done the same for rocks from the moon and Mars. That means age estimates have to be based on circumstantial evidence. That evidence, in part, comes from dust.

Think of the icy rings as resembling a field of snow: After a pristine start, soot from afar gradually pollutes it. In order to estimate the age of the snow, scientists have to measure the rate at which soot is falling, as well as the total amount of soot already there.

Most of this material is being delivered by micrometeoroids from the Kuiper belt, a distant source of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. To uncover the total mass of cosmic soot in the rings, researchers then had to weigh the rings themselves.

As the spacecraft swooped through the rings, it precisely measured the net gravitational pull at every point. With this information — the amount of soot and the rate at which it is falling — scientists estimated that it would have taken between 10 million and million years for that proverbial snowy field to find itself sullied.