Dust Analysis Suggests Youthful Age for Saturn's Rings
New evidence suggests that Saturn's rings are no more than 400 million years old, and potentially less than 100 million years old. The rings are very thin, spread out over a large surface area, and almost entirely made up of pure water ice. The age estimate is based on the rate at which the rings have been bombarded by interplanetary dust, as measured by the Cosmic Dust Analyzer on board the Cassini spacecraft. A young set of rings around Saturn means that they wouldn't have formed with the planet, but rather from a catastrophic event such as the shattering of an ice-rich moon.
