Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Saturn's Rings

Episode Date: August 23, 2023

Friends, treasure Saturn’s rings while they are young. They won’t be around forever.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to I.C.'s Daily Game every weekday on the I.H.R. Radio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and start your morning with me. 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. That's right. We're talking about Saturn's rings and big thanks to Dr. E.'Neill, who wrote this for Heelstuffworks.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, 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 100 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 younger than we thought. Chuck, that was such an amazing intro. I'm, I, that was great stuff, man. Hey, Jerry, to say we were on fire before we recorded. So we can thank our friends at NASA for launching the Cassini mission.

They had more. Yeah. NASA in the, there was a three, three, uh, what do you call it? A monoget, what? Sure. NASA and the, we got to shut up the Euro Space Agency. The ESA, sure. And the Italian Space Agency, which is a nod of the ISA, but it's the ASI, don't ask.

Very nice. So this Cassini mission creates stuff to chuck. It was flying around Saturn for, I saw 13 years, I think, Dr. O'Neill says 13 years, I saw up to 20. Yeah, they've launched in 97 but it entered the orbit of Saturn in 2004. 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 solar

system. You knew who else is? Who? Jerry. She is kind of gassy, isn't she? He's a gas giant. So we've learned a lot about Saturn and one of the things we've learned,

number one, 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 got to figure out a way to dispose of the Cassini probe without just crash landing it because it could be lousy with earth germs on it still. Sure.

You 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. I gotcha. It was way better on paper. Yeah, sorry.

But you actually wrote that out? Yeah, I actually did. Some of them are so good I don't want to forget them. So I'm sure. Yeah, I gotcha. And that's a good example of it. So that's what happened, right? The thing was low on fuel.

And so they did that. They burned it up in that upper atmosphere. 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 going to say her. Cassini's at the end of her mission.

She's been 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. That gap between the planet and its innermost ring. What's going on there? 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 we're I'm sure we're going to find some gases uh... but they basically thought like you know it's empty in between there there as Dave

Matthews would say their space between and that's what 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, that is the rings sort of falling apart, right? 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. And they learned it by sending Cassini on a crazy, screwy mission, flying orbits inside the gap between the planet and its innermost ring, which is really, really cool. And I say we take a break, we'll come back and talk about what Cassini taught us. Let's do it.

So first off we've been saying just Cassini it was technically the Cassini Huygens. Oh yeah, it didn't see that anywhere. But Huygens is kind of clunky so every in Cassini just I guess that was the Italian input. Sure. So Cassini sounds better. But one of the things they learn like we said is that these rings have about a hundred million years to live which sounds like a long time and it is. But considering Saturn is about four billion years old it's much shorter than they thought. Did you say that it's raining 10 tons of material per second? No, no, no, I didn't.

That's a great stat. It is. And it's hilarious that they went with 10 tons because it's 9,072 kilograms, but 10 metric tons is 10,000 kilograms. Okay. If you say so. Regardless, that's how much is raining down in particulate forms. So that's a lot of raining down in particular form.

So that's a lot of particles that it's using every second, but there's still so much of it that's gonna take 100 million years to dissolve. Yeah, totally. And here's, I mean, this is 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 ring plane,

they said the people running the mission that three-pronged Manaja Toa, as you said, said, you know what, those rings and those moons have gravitational pull. So why don't we just let it work its magic on the spacecraft and let it pull it a little bit in whatever direction it's going to go in. That'll result in these little bit of changes to its trajectory. We can measure those,

and that'll allow us to find out the mass of this thing using magic. They could detect fractions of a millimeter per second increases in acceleration. That's how sensitive the stuff that Cassini was sending back. Cassini Huygens. Sure. It sounds like Jerry Lewis saying Cassini. Cassini Huygens. Exactly.

Well, hey. So what they were doing was they were figuring out the mass of the rings by figuring out how much the probe 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 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 much stuff in there that they actually appear as rings. And so, look, it didn't even navigate that asteroid. Not a chance. And so, the longer that they were around, the more space stuff they're going to

attract. So, there would be more mass, 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 them a lot about what's going on inside of Saturn. Yeah, as they figured out in the end was, 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 6,000 miles deep. And they were moving slower, about 4% slower than the upper atmospheric clouds that we could see.

And that was sort of the discrepancy. It was an anomaly that they did not know about, and therefore, couldn't predict. Right. 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 gravitational waves,

but I don't think that's what it was. They had city waves? Yes, they had a measurement from before that they're like, that is way low. There must be some 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 because 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

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 110 million years old. Yeah, which is way off. Initially, they said anywhere anywhere it depends but from 4.5 billion years to maybe Like 30 million years, right But so yeah, they figured it out what they figured it out and by the way, I want to do a whole episode on Saturn but They but they fun with 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 a icy comet

Mm-hmm that got caught in Saturn's orbit and Was basically pulled apart by the gravity of Saturn and turned into a spread out into a ring So what you're seeing is a super spread out comet, which is pretty cool. It's also possible it's moon that the same fate happened to, it's just kind of crumbled and came apart. But the, um, Ken might say it's beach. The, the, the upside of it is, um, that we're going to do an episode on Saturn, so look for that one day. Yeah, and the upside is that this could,

I mean, if it was an errant comment, that could happen again to another planet. So there could potentially, in another, you know, 20, 30 million years, be another one of our beloved planets with their own rings. That's right. And I said upside, I met upshot, of course. Of course, and that, of course, means short stuff is out.

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