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Solar system

Saturn's ring rain

Nature volume 496, pages 178–179 (2013)Cite this article

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A Correction to this article was published on 01 May 2013

Saturn's atmosphere bears a latent image of its icy rings, implying that electrically charged bits of water ice are being transported along magnetic-field lines of force from sources in the ring plane to the upper atmosphere. See Letter p.193

The origin and evolution of Saturn's rings has been a particularly vexing problem over the past several decades of planetary exploration, and is one that has obvious implications for the formation of the Solar System. And although much progress has been made in understanding the dynamics of the ring system, both observationally and theoretically, the big questions remain unanswered. How and when did Saturn's rings form? Can they be the last surviving remnants of a much more massive ring system that formed 4.5 billion years ago1, coeval with the primordial gaseous disk that condensed to form Saturn? Or are the rings relatively young, say about 100 million years old, as implied by a suite of mechanisms that would disperse2, darken3 and erode4,5,6 them? Observations obtained by O'Donoghue and colleagues7 with the Keck telescope, and reported on page 193 of this issue, point ominously to an electromagnetic erosion mechanism that siphons away ring mass and deposits it in Saturn's upper atmosphere — a process that may explain some of the gross structure of the rings4,5,6.

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Figure 1: Saturn's rings and magnetic field.

CAROL LADD/NASA

Figure 2: Saturn's atmospheric transmission and H3+ emission lines in the near infrared.

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  1. Jack Connerney is at the Planetary Magnetospheres Laboratory, Goddard Space Flight Center, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Code 695, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771, USA.,

    Jack Connerney

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Correspondence to Jack Connerney.

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Connerney, J. Saturn's ring rain. Nature 496, 178–179 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/496178a

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