# Why Saturn's Losing Its Rings

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Spectacular Science
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdmV9PwAlQc
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/42875

## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) []

One of the solar systems most iconic things may be gone forever saturn's rings which are the most iconic things in the solar system and iconic to the planet itself may disappear in the near future or even 100 million years in the future how does this even happen and what's the story behind Saturn's rings and what lies ahead for this massive ring system that surrounds Saturn and is just mind-blowing to see well in this episode I'm going to take you behind the science of Saturn's rings and unveil how they might disappear in the future and how they may temporarily disappear also currently on Spectacular Science and this week on this episode let's get into the science let's go all right before we get into how Saturn's rings might disappear let's look at how Saturn's rings were formed in the first place well this all takes us back billions of years when Saturn was still kind of a young planet and the entire solar system was still forming billions of years ago we think that a moon or a comet broke up around Saturn is a massive planet and it's so big that the gravity is very strong and the strong gravity if a moon or even a comet gets too close to the planet it'll just break up into billions of pieces and those pieces will start orbiting around the planet causing these rings to form so what we believe is that a moon got a little too close for comfort to Saturn or even a comet and many of these happened over the course of billions of years and that's how Saturn's icy rocky ring system was formed and this rocky and icy ring system have pieces of the moon or piece of the comets that are still orbiting around Saturn right now and that's how we know that this might be how Saturn's rings were formed saturn actually has layers of its rings there's different sections based on how bright they are and the composition of the rings and these rings goes from closest to furthest away from the planet they go D C B and then this place called the Cassini division and then the A rings and the A and B rings are the brightest and they are split by this Cassini division what exactly is the Cassini division and what we essentially discovered is that this Cassini division is formed by one of Saturn's moons called Mimas and this moon orbits around Saturn every few hours and as it orbits around it it's a little close to Saturn so it's inside the ring system so essentially splits it apart and the gravity of Mimas Saturn basically interact with each other and that causes this ring system to basically have a split in the middle that's what causes Cassini division to happen and there's a lots of physics and gravity and lots of math that goes on behind this in fact there are a lot of studies that have been conducted by researchers in order to find out more about this Cassini division and how Saturn's moon Mimas was able to do all this and there are a lot of papers that are written about this published by scientists all over the world and the Cassini division is a really really interesting piece of the puzzle for Saturn's rings now how do we know this much about Saturn's rings Saturn's moons and so much more well it's all thanks to the Cassini spacecraft nasa launched the Cassini spacecraft in order to study Saturn its rings and the moons this eventually crashed into Saturn as it was decommissioned and was retired but this mission provided so much insight on Saturn its rings and its moons and so much of things that we cover in this episode were discovered by the Cassini spacecraft all right now to get into the core of this episode why are Saturn's rings disappearing well this is all because of Saturn's gravity you see as we talked about earlier these rings are made up of thousands of pieces of ice and rock that are from these comets and these moons have been broken down around Saturn now these rings they are getting closer and closer to Saturn as we speak due to the amount of gravity that Saturn has and as these things orbit around and around the planets they get drawn in due to the very intense gravity and eventually it'll start raining this these rings on Saturn and these rings will start crashing into the planet itself even though the planet's just made of gas it'll just disintegrate in the atmospheres and these rings will fade over hundreds of millions of years and this is all thanks to the amount of gravity that Saturn has and all of these rings getting pulled into the planets and eventually disappearing for good and these rings might not even be visible after all of this has happened but luckily it'll take a few hundred million years for to happen so you can look at your telescope and you can see Saturn's rings now or not saturn's rings can temporarily be out of sight and this is due to the angle of which Saturn is tilted and the rings are tilted and also to the angle of how that looks to Earth you see at certain points of the orbit around the sun

### Segment 2 (05:00 - 08:00) [5:00]

Saturn's rings are basically in the same plane as how we look at it from Earth so it'll appear not to be there and this happens pretty frequently and you can't see these rings but luckily this is only temporary so it'll go by soon and in this time that this episode is being recorded in 2025 these rings might not be visible fully because of this plane this orbital plane and orbital angle but in a few years or even a few months this will all resolve back to normal and you can still see Saturn's rings but in the long term Saturn's rings will disappear due to the amount of gravity all right we learned a lot in this episode about Saturn's rings and its potential future let's review what we learned in this episode all right what did we learn in this episode we learned that Saturn's rings were formed by a moon or comet that clot too close to the planet and broke up around causing this ring system to form saturn's rings have layers and also a place called the Cassini division which is caused by Saturn's moon Mimas and its gravity which splits the rings and Saturn's rings may disappear in the near future because of the intense gravity of the planet as these rings spin around the planet and all these little particles of ice and dust and rocks spin around the planet they get closer and eventually will crash into Saturn but luckily this will take a 100 million years to happen so we can still see Saturn's rings for now and you might not be able to see Saturn's rings temporarily from Earth because of our viewing angle saturn and its rings are tilted a little bit and so is the Earth so the plane in which we see Saturn's rings might be a little tilted and it might align with Earth giving the illusion that the rings aren't there but really they're just still there it's just the angle that we're looking at it from that's it for this episode thank you so much for listening to this episode of Spectacular Science produced and hosted by me Akshay Jayaraman our music are by Charan Ramachandran please visit my podcast website spectacularsci. com to find interactive activities articles and blog posts that's spectacularsci. com do you have a science question answer on spectacular science episode and get a special shout out well head over to spectacularsci. com/contact then you can find a contact form to send me your amazing science questions you can also tag me on Instagram @spectacularscipod that's @spectacularscipod thank you so much don't forget to grab your spectacular science merch at shop. spectacularsci. com there you can find t-shirts hoodies mugs water bottles and more that's shop. spectacularsci. com spectacularside. com thank you so much also don't forget to subscribe to this podcast if you're listening right now it really encourages me that you'll be updated on the new episodes so go ahead and subscribe and share this podcast with your friends and family thank you so much for 500 subscribers on YouTube it really means a lot and I'm really hoping to get to my goal of 1,000 by the end of this year so go ahead and subscribe thank you so much for listening and we'll see you on our next episode of Spectacular Science keep thinking about science!