NASA’s Cassini space probe has captured a close-up view of the beautiful and glamorous rings of Saturn, the sixth planet from the Sun.
This close-up image of Saturn’s rings was taken in red light with the wide-angle camera on the Cassini spacecraft on January 8, 2015. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute.
The ring system of Saturn is the most distinctive feature of the planet and is among the most recognizable features in our Solar System.
The rings spread over 175,000 miles (282,000 km), yet they are extremely thin – perhaps only 30 feet (10 m) thick.
They consist largely of water ice mixed with smaller amounts of dust and rocky matter.
Despite their impressive appearance, there is very little material in the rings – if they were compressed into a single body it would be no more than 60 miles (100 km) across.
Scientists still aren’t sure exactly how old the Saturn’s rings are. They once thought that the rings were formed at the same time as the planets, coalescing out of swirling clouds of interstellar gas 4 billion years ago. However, the rings now appear to be young, perhaps only hundreds of millions of years old.
Another theory suggests that a comet flew too close to Saturn and was broken up by tidal forces. Possibly one of Saturn’s moons was struck by an asteroid smashing it to pieces that now form the rings.
Though Saturn may have had rings since it formed, they are not stable and must be regenerated by ongoing processes, probably the break-up of larger satellites.
Named alphabetically in order of their discovery, the order of the main rings outward from Saturn is D, C, B, A, F, G and E. There are also several other faint unnamed rings made up of very fine icy particles.
From afar, they look like a homogenous disk of material. But upon closer examination from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, scientists see that there are varied structures in the rings at almost every scale imaginable.
The dark gaps near the left edge of the A ring (the broad, outermost ring in this image) are caused by the moons Pan and Daphnis embedded in the gaps, while the wider Cassini division (dark area between the B ring and A ring) is created by a resonance with the medium-sized moon Mimas.
Prometheus is seen orbiting just outside the A ring in the lower left quadrant of this image; the F ring can be faintly seen to the left of Prometheus.
This close-up view of the rings, obtained at a distance of 566,000 miles (911,000 km) from the planet, looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 15 degrees above the ringplane.
