The Slow Disappearance of Saturn's Iconic Rings.

New research based on data captured by NASA's Cassini mission reveals that Saturn's icy rings are younger than the planet itself and are gradually eroding, meaning they may disappear completely in a few hundred years. The rings are made up of mostly ice and rocky dust from broken asteroids and are losing many tons of mass per second. The findings suggest that something dramatic happened in Saturn's satellite system in the last few hundred million years, and that studying the planet's rings could provide insight into the active and diverse systems of planets.