Okay, I’m old. I know it, and people who see me know it. The 40s may be the new 30s, but the 70s are still the 70s! That’s young compared to Harriet, a captive Galapagos tortoise who is 175 years old, or a female Greenland shark believed to be 392 years old, give or take a few years. That’s even young compared to a bristlecone pine tree in California that is over 4,800 years old, or to the rings of Saturn.

Rings of Saturn? Yep, the rings of Saturn. Did you know they are disappearing? As humans we are intrigued with beginnings and endings and with the ending of the rings of Saturn we ask about their beginnings. Have they always been there or are they relatively new? We used to think that the rings were as old as Saturn, which is as old as the Solar System, which is about 4.5 billion years, give or take a few million.

Most astronomers agree, and our space probes have verified, that the rings are made up of ice and snow. There is a problem, however. We see the rings because they reflect the light of the Sun, but the problem is that the rings are not reflecting as much light as they should! Why?

In your house there is dust…everywhere…it settles on the bookcase, on the mantel of the fireplace and on the TV. Well, in space there is also dust…everywhere… and it is settling on the ice and snow crystals of the rings and reducing their “albedo”, or the amount of light that they reflect.

In calculating how long it would take space dust to dim the albedo of ice and snow to what we see today, astronomers have come up with a “beginning” of the rings 100 million years ago…give or take a few million years.

Astronomers believe that an icy moon or comet came too close to Saturn, the second largest planet in the Solar System. The massive gravitational force of Saturn ripped the comet apart. The pieces now revolve around Saturn and we see them as rings.

These rings are ending. Two reasons: first, anything that orbits another body eventually gets pulled into that body. For Saturn this is called “ring rain” and it consists of about 20,000 pounds of material every second!

Secondly, charged particles from the sun, what we call the “Solar Wind”, are striking the rings. When those particles hit the earth, our magnetic field draws them to the poles and they cause the “northern lights”. When they hit the rings of Saturn they charge the small ice and snow particles which are then drawn down into Saturn’s magnetic field where they melt the equivalent of an Olympic-sized swimming pool every 30-minutes. The rings are “dying”.

The rings of Saturn are tilted about 26 degrees from the line of sight and thus the rings appear different each year. Last year our orbit and that of Saturn placed the rings in an edge-on view so that they were almost invisible. This year we can see them again, so, I’m going to head out around 2 a.m. and point my telescope at Saturn and take a look at those rings before they are gone. According to astronomers I only have about 100 million years…give or take a few million... to do so!