Saturn ’s rings are so quintessential to how we project the planet that it seems almost haywire to picture the gas giant without them . But it seems potential that the planet was not bear with them . stargazer have presented the most whole evidence yet that the hoop are not ancient at all . They form no more than 400 million years ago .

Saturn , like the rest of the planets , is about 4.5 billion years old ( though it ’s notthe old major planet ) . The team used reflexion from the Cassini missionary post to lick out the age of the pack in an cunning way : by measuring how much dust they have gain .

There is dust all over the Solar System and this can end up address planet , moons , and asteroids . It also ends up covering the water ice fragments that make up Saturn ’s closed chain . found on the data from Cassini , the team found the rings have been gather rubble for only a few hundred million long time . The rings are about 98 percent pure water glass , meaning they are too clean to be ancient .

“ It ’s almost impossible to cease up with something so clean , ” lead author Sascha Kempf at the University of Colorado Boulder said in astatement . “ Think about the ring like the carpet in your house . If you have a clean carpet put out , you just have to wait . Dust will settle down on your carpet . The same is true for the rings . ”

According to the team ’s calculations , each year the ring should accumulate 1 gram of space dust per square foundation . Just focusing on the undimmed rings on the major planet , they extend from 70,000 to 140,000 kilometers ( 43,500 to 87,000 mile ) , equivalent to an area of 30 Earths . That mean that about166 billion tonsof dust land on them every class . And you think your ledge are dusty .

But even this Brobdingnagian telephone number is tiny compared to the batch of the ring . It ’s literally a sprinkling of rubble . They still spark .

“ We know roughly how old the ring are , but it does n’t figure out any of our other problems , ” Kempf said . “ We still do n’t know how these rings formed in the first position . ”

There is an idea thata planet was rip apartby Saturn ’s sobriety . Most of the moon fell down onto the major planet and the repose is in the rings , which are alsofalling downonto the planet andheating upits atmosphere .

Saturn ’s tintinnabulation are a beautiful feature but like many things of stunner , might be an ephemera . In that casing , we are lucky that we are in the poor cosmic window of several hundred million long time where we can see them .

The study is published inScience Advances .