The rings are fairly shiny despite being bombarded by dust, indicating that they haven’t been around for very long.

atmosphere and rings. Because Saturn’s rings are mostly made up of ice chunks—and a small percentage of tiny rock particles—they darken with time as cosmic dust accumulates on them.

This means we are just lucky to be living in an age when the giant planet has its magnificent rings ... they are then funnelled down into Saturn’s atmosphere. This “ring rain” was first ...

[Related: Saturn’s rings have been slowly heating up its atmosphere.] In theory, EELS would traverse the surface of Enceladus towards one of the moon’s many “plume vents,” which it could ...

This means we are just lucky to be living in an age when the giant planet has its magnificent rings ... they are then funneled down into Saturn’s atmosphere. This “ring rain” was first ...

Saturn's ring's are a young age of only 400million years old — just a fraction of the 5billion years the planet has existed for. An international team of physicists has the most compelling ...

Maxwell determined that the "ring" had to be made up of lots of small particles, all independently orbiting Saturn ... plunged to its fiery death in the gas giant's atmosphere.

Discovered in 1610 by Galileo, Saturn's rings have been viewed for hundreds of years by astronomers. These rings, composed ...

he and his colleagues set out to put a date on Saturn's rings by studying how rapidly this layer of dust builds up -- a bit like telling how old a house is by running your finger along its surfaces.

With remote observations we can only access the visible surface of the planet, which only accounts for the uppermost reaches of its atmosphere ... up the rings respond to the gravity of Saturn.

Enceladus is Saturn's sixth-largest moon and one of the most promising potential sites in the solar system for hosting life. It orbits Saturn within the planet’s E-ring, and continually spews ...

This means we are just lucky to be living in an age when the giant planet has its magnificent rings ... they are then funneled down into Saturn's atmosphere. This "ring rain" was first observed ...