Environment

Saturn's Rings Disappear Today. Why?

by candice.tsuei | August 11, 2009 at 09:52 am

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Saturn's rings will disappear from our view today.

Saturn's ring system was formed 4.5 billion years ago, and have been loaded with 35 trillion-trillion tons of ice, mud, boulders, and tiny moons. While the stack of rings are 170,000-mile-wide, they are only about 30-feet-thick.

So, why will the rings disappear?

Firstly, the reason why rings whine and are visible to human eyes is because they reflect sunlight, but every 15 years, Saturn turns edge-on to the Sun and the rings reflect almost no sunlight, thus becoming invisible.

"The light reflecting off this extremely narrow band is so small that for all intents and purposes the rings simply vanish," explained Linda Spilker, deputy project scientist for the Cassini Saturn mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

All of the planets in the solar system "wobble" on their axes. This causes a change of altitude, which will eventually place a planet's equator directly in line with the photons of light streaming in from the sun, according to Nasa. This phenomenon is the equinox.

An equinox - when the Sun crosses its equator and makes the day and night the same length - comes twice a year on a planet. While Earth orbits the Sun once every 365 days, it takes Saturn nearly 30 years, resulting in an equinox every 15 years. Therefore, this is the first equinox since 1994.