The rings of Saturn are disappearing and we don’t know how long they will last. Since the 1980s, astronomers have discovered icy inner rings. Saturn It is constantly eroded in its upper atmosphere. The downpour is coming so fast that it hits the gas giant every day pouring rain From the Olympic pool. However, the question of how quickly it shrinks cult ring system – what determines when to disappear – remains open.

Fortunately, NASA’s powerful space telescope James Webb (JWST or Webb), with its powerful instruments observing galaxies so far far from the early universe, will soon investigate this intriguing phenomenon much closer to home.

“We’re still trying to figure out exactly how fast they collapse,” said James O’Donoghue, a planetary scientist at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, who will lead a new effort to determine how long Saturn’s rings last. The statement was released on Monday, April 17. “For now, research shows that the rings will remain part of Saturn for several hundred million years.”

To better predict the lifetimes of Saturn’s iconic rings, JWST and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii will be part of a long-term observing campaign to study the planet. The telescopes will help observe how the rain ring phenomenon fluctuates over a full season on the gas giant, which takes about seven Earth years thanks to its distant orbit from the Sun.

Astronomers expect interesting data from the campaign, as previous research has shown that large amounts of ring material are constantly falling on Saturn. For example, data sent home from a NASA spacecraft “Cassini”During its dive to the planet in 2017, it crossed the gap between Saturn and its rings 22 times, showing it to be somewhere between 880 pounds (400 kg) and 6,000 pounds (2,800). kg) icy rain is pouring on the planet every second and warms the upper atmosphere.

Rings at this speed to disappear about 300 million years later. Although it still seems like a long time, the flood has created a system of symbolic rings.relatively fast death» on cosmic time scales. But the rate at which the ring material rains down on the planet is still uncertain; Astronomers say the rings could disappear in 100 million years, or could exist for 1.1 billion years.

“We have a very broad estimate right now,” O’Donoghue told Space.com on Wednesday, April 26. “We want to make more observations that will narrow the tidal range.”

Space rocks and the sun, according to current research radiation It interferes slightly with the ring particles and gives them an electric charge that connects with the gas giant’s magnetic field lines. Then, Saturn’s gravity, guided by magnetic fields, pulls ice particles that fall into the upper layers of the planet’s atmosphere, but not always at the same speed.