Saturn's surprisingly young rings and record-breaking bounty of moons make the planet a ripe target for springtime skywatchers
Saturn is the jewel of the solar system, with its magnificent rings and retinue of weird moons. It’s the faintest of the naked-eye planets—technically Uranus is sometimes bright enough to see, though you need good eyesight and a very dark site—but still fairly easy to pick out among the stars.
If you’d prefer to avoid a predawn viewing, in this case, waiting is fine, too: Saturn’s rings and moons aren’t going to vanish . And as summer progresses, the planet rises earlier and gets higher in the sky at a more reasonable time. By late June it rises around midnight in many locations, for example, and by late August it reaches the sky watching sweet spot: it rises at sunset and stays up all night.
Saturn is iconic among its planetary siblings because of its rings, of course. Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune all have rings, too, but those are thin, faint and difficult to see without spacecraft or powerful telescopes. Saturn’s rings stretch an incredible 175,000 miles across—three quarters of the distance between Earth and our moon!
New research, just published in the planetary science journal Icarus, reinforces the notion that not only are the rings young, but also they won’t last forever. The researchers also found the rings are eroding at a rate that means they’ll disappear sometime between 15 million and 400 million years from now. That’s a long time in human terms but still only a fraction of the solar system’s age.
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