Short Stuff: Saturn's Rings

Friends, treasure Saturn’s rings while they are young. They won’t be around forever.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. We're just zooming through
the universe trio of cool cats who apparently can survive
in the vacuum of space.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
That's right, we're talking about Saturn's rings and big thanks
to doctor Ian O'Neil, who wrote this for houstuffworks dot com.
And we're talking about Saturn's rings because semi recently, in
the grand scheme of things, what like six years ago
or so, and in the time since, we have learned
a couple of kind of cool things about Saturn. One

(00:40):
not cool as in like, hey, it's good that this
is happening, but cool as in we never knew this stuff. Yeah. One,
in the next one hundred million years, Saturn's rings will
no longer be around. They're going to disappear, completely denuded.
And Two, because of what we're going to tell you
about in a second, we learned a lot more about
those rings and the fact that they are a lot

(01:01):
younger than we thought.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
Chuck, that was such an amazing intro. I'm that was
great stuff. Man.

Speaker 2 (01:07):
Hey, Jerry just said we were on fire before we recorded.

Speaker 1 (01:10):
So we can thank our friends at NASA for launching
the Cassini mission and more robe.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
Yeah, NASA in the it was a three three uh
what do you call it? A monagatwa Sure, NASA and
the we got to shout out the euro Space Agency ESA,
sure and the utality in a space agency which is
not of the ISA. But it's the aside, don't.

Speaker 1 (01:32):
Ask very nice. So this this Cassini mission, great stuff, Chuck, chuck.
It was flying around Saturn for I saw thirteen years.
I think doctor o'neilsa's thirteen years. I saw up to twenty.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
Yeah, they launched in ninety seven, but it entered the
orbit of Saturn in two thousand and four.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
Ah, there's the discrepancy. Yeah, but we learned a lot
about Saturn, which is, by the way, one of the
gas giants of our of our Solar system.

Speaker 2 (01:59):
Any who else is Jerry.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
She is kind of gassy, isn't she.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
He's a gas giant.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
So we learned a lot about Saturn. And one of
the things we learned, number one, that there's tons of
moons around Saturn. Number two that there's some of these
moons might be habitable. And so as a result, when
they launched the Cassini mission. They were like, okay, we've
we've got to figure out a way to dispose of
the Cassini probe without just crash landing it, because you

(02:28):
know it could be lousy with earth germs on it. Still,
I don't want to infect one of these moons. So
they burned it up in the atmosphere instead. And I
realized that this is like the NASA equivalent of wearing
a mask. Explain, well, they didn't want to contaminate the moon,
so they burned the thing up in the atmosphere.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
I got you.

Speaker 1 (02:51):
It was way better on paper.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
Yeah, but you actually wrote that out.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
Yeah. Actually, some of them are so good I don't
want to forget them.

Speaker 2 (03:02):
Yeah, I gotcha.

Speaker 1 (03:03):
And that's a good example of it.

Speaker 2 (03:04):
Uh huh. So that's what happened, right, This thing was
low on fuel and so they did that. They burned
it up in that upper atmosphere.

Speaker 1 (03:12):
They did, but they said, you know what we're going
to do, We're going to do something crazy. Cassini's at
the end of its mission. I'm gonna say her. Cassini's
at the end of her mission. She's been a stout
and true pioneer for US teaching us all sorts of
great stuff about Saturn. But one thing we don't know
about is what is between Saturn's rings and the planet itself.

(03:35):
That's great gap between the planet and its innermost ring.
What's going on there?

Speaker 2 (03:41):
Yeah, and like, not only what's going on there, but
what can we learn a about the rings and about
Saturn as a whole if we learn about what's going
on in between those rings. They thought, well, you know,
I'm sure we're going to find some gases. But they
basically thought, like, you know, it's empty in between there,
as Dave Matthews would, there's space between, and that's what

(04:03):
they thought. But what they found was not that at all.
What they found was a virtual rainstorm of particles and
elements and molecules raining down between the gaps. And what
they found out was hold on a second, these That is,
the rings sort of falling apart, right.

Speaker 1 (04:24):
Yeah, they're dissolving onto it's just falling into the atmosphere
of Saturn, which is pretty cool. But what that implies
is that since there's a finite amount of these rings,
eventually they're going to dissolve. There won't be any rings
any longer. And that was a big thing that they
did not know before. They didn't know the age of
the rings. They didn't know that the rings were slowly dissolving.

(04:47):
And they learned it by sending Cassini on a crazy
screw e mission flying orbits inside the gap between the
planet and its inner string, which is really really cool.
And I say, we take a break, we'll come back
and talk about what Cassini taught us.

Speaker 2 (05:06):
Let's do it. So first off, we've been saying just Cassini,

(05:38):
it was technically the Cassini Huygens.

Speaker 1 (05:40):
Oh yeah, I didn't see that anyway.

Speaker 2 (05:42):
But Huygens is kind of clunky, so everyone in Cassini
just I guess that was the Italian input. Sure, so
Cassini sounds better. But one of the things they learned,
like we said, is that these rings have about one
hundred million years to live, which sounds like a long
time and it is, but considering Saturn is a about
four billion years old, it's much shorter than they thought.

Speaker 1 (06:04):
Did you say that it's raining ten tons of material
per second?

Speaker 2 (06:08):
No? No, no, I didn't. That's a great stat.

Speaker 1 (06:10):
It is, and it's hilarious that they went with ten
tons because it's nine thousand and seventy two kilograms. But
ten metric tons is ten thousand.

Speaker 2 (06:17):
Kilograms, okay if you say so.

Speaker 1 (06:20):
Regardless, that's how much is raining down in particulate form.
So that's a lot of particles that it's using every second.
But there's still so much of it that's going to
take one hundred million years to dissolve.

Speaker 2 (06:32):
Yeah, totally. And here's I mean, this is this kind
of tough stuff. But here's how I understand it and
how they figured some of this stuff out was while
Cassini Huygens was going through that that ring plane, they said,
the people running the mission that that three pronged Manasata
as you said, said, you know what, those those rings

(06:54):
and those moons have gravitational pulls, So why don't we
just let it work its magic on the space and
let it pull it a little bit in whatever direction
it's going to go in and that will result in
these little bitty changes to its trajectory and we can
measure those and that'll allow us to find out the
mass of this thing using magic.

Speaker 1 (07:15):
Right, Yeah, they could detect fractions of a millimeter per
second increases in acceleration. That's how sensitive the stuff that
Cassini was sending back Cassini Huyggens. Sure, it sounds like
Jerry lewis saying Cassini, Cassini, Huygens exactly. Hey, So what
they were doing was they were figuring out the mass
of the rings by figuring out how much the probe

(07:41):
resisted the pull of Saturn itself. Yeah, okay, And then
by figuring out the mass of the rings, they could
make a pretty good guess at the age of the rings, right,
because less mass would be younger, more mass would be older.
Because this is a These things are spinning in a
very tight orbit around Saturn. They're not like these solid things.
It's kind of like an asteroid belt, but there's so

(08:03):
much stuff in there that they actually appear as rings.

Speaker 2 (08:07):
An solo couldn't even navigate that asteroidery.

Speaker 1 (08:09):
Not a chance. And so the longer that they are around,
the more space stuff they're going to attract. So there
would be more masks, the older they were, less mass,
the younger they were. But what they found out was
that the predictions were way off, that what they came
up with was just didn't make any sense. And what
they figured out how to explain it was actually taught

(08:30):
them a lot about what's going on inside of Saturn.

Speaker 2 (08:33):
Yeah, as they figured out in the end, that was because,
like we said, it was being altered by the tug
of gravity, but it was also being altered by these
big flows of material in that atmosphere at the equator,
which was about six thousand miles deep, and they were
moving slower, about four percent slower than the upper atmosphereic

(08:55):
clouds that we could see. And that was sort of
the discrepancy. It was that they did not know about
and therefore couldn't predict right.

Speaker 1 (09:04):
So once they figured out that the mass of the
rings are actually much lower than they thought, they took
some other measurement from I can't remember, some sort of waves.
I guess gravitation always, but I don't think that's what
it was. Yes, they had a measurement from before that
they're like, that is way low. There must be some

(09:26):
hidden mass in there that we're not detecting from the
density waves. And when they did the calculations they figured
out Nope, that was actually a pretty good estimate. These
things are not as massive as you think, so they're
made up of fairly light stuff. And because it's not massive,
and because the rings are still very bright, it suggests

(09:47):
that there's not a lot of rocky crud mixed in there,
which suggests that they're fairly young. So they estimate that
the age of Saturn's rings are between one hundred and
ten million years.

Speaker 2 (09:58):
Old, Yeah, which is way off. Initially they said anywhere
it depends, but from four point five billion years to
maybe like thirty million years.

Speaker 1 (10:09):
Right, yeah, but so yeah, they figured it out what
they think figured And by the way, I want to
do a whole episode on Saturn. But they they both
that they believe. No, it's gonna be great. Remember our
Venus episode was really fun. Yeah, So what they believe
is that either the rings are made up of an

(10:31):
icy comet that got caught in Saturn's orbit and was
basically pulled apart by the gravity of Saturn and it
turned into spread out into a ring. So what you're
seeing is a super spread out comet, Whi's pretty cool.
It's also possible it's Moon that the same fate happened
to it just kind of crumbled and came apart, but the.

Speaker 2 (10:54):
Kin might say it's beach.

Speaker 1 (10:56):
The upside of it is that we're going to do
an episode on Saturday, and so look for that one day.

Speaker 2 (11:04):
Yeah, And the upside is that this could I mean,
if it was an arrant comment, that could happen again
to another planet. So there could potentially, in another you know,
twenty thirty million years, be another one of our beloved
planets with their own rings.

Speaker 1 (11:18):
That's right, And I sent upside on that upshot of course,
of course, and that of course means short stuff is app.

Speaker 2 (11:28):
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