NASA says that in about 18 months, Saturn’s rings will appear to vanish from Earth. But there’s no need to be sad: they’ll only be hidden from our point of view. Astronomers expect they won’t be visible again until October 2038.
One day these giant rings will disappear forever. NASA’s Cassini probe, which flew through Saturn’s rings 22 times, found that the rings are “dying” at a rapid pace. They lose between 400 and 2,800 kilograms of mass every second. Even so, it will take several hundred million years for the rings to disappear completely.
Why will Saturn’s rings disappear from Earth’s view?
NASA explains that Saturn will tilt so the rings appear edge-on from Earth, looking like a thin, nearly invisible line.
These rings span roughly 70,000 to 140,000 kilometers in width. Their average thickness is about 10 meters, and in some places they are as thin as a sheet of paper. Viewed from the right angle, the rings can effectively vanish.
Because of Saturn’s axial tilt, the planet wobbles slightly as it orbits the Sun during its 29.5-year orbital period. Every 13.7 to 15.7 years, observers on Earth see the rings edge-on. From our vantage point, about 1.2 billion kilometers away, the rings can seem to disappear.
Currently the rings are tilted about 9 degrees toward Earth. The Daily Mail reports that by 2024 this tilt will shrink to about 3.7 degrees.
The last time the rings became essentially invisible from Earth was September 2009; before that, it happened in February 1996.
After the next disappearance in 2025, the rings will gradually become more noticeable starting in 2032 and will be easiest to observe by 2038.
A little more about Saturn and its rings
Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second-largest planet in our Solar System after Jupiter. The average distance from Saturn to the Sun is about 1.434 billion kilometers. Saturn’s surface area is roughly 42.7 billion km², and its radius is about 58,232 km.
Thanks to its bright rings, Saturn is often called the “pearl of the Solar System.” While other planets have rings, none are as complex or spectacular as Saturn’s.
The rings are mainly made of ice, rock, and dust captured by the planet’s gravity. Some particles are no larger than grains of sand, while some chunks of ice can be the size of a house or even a mountain.
Scientists think the rings formed from remnants of comets, asteroids, and moons torn apart by Saturn’s strong gravity.
