Open Thread

by Mary

The Cassini spacecraft that has been observing the area around Saturn has provided data putting the age of the rings around Saturn to much older than thought before. The evidence appears to show that the rings date back to the beginning of the planet and that they are constantly recycling themselves.

"The evidence is consistent with the picture that Saturn has had rings all through its history," said Esposito of the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. "We see extensive, rapid recycling of ring material, in which moons are continually shattered into ring particles, which then gather together and re-form moons."

That's a pretty cool finding, right?

[Ed: planetary news seems to be pretty big today. :-) ]