Saturn's rings are disappearing — NASA estimates they'll be gone within 100 million years — which means we happen to be alive during the brief window of cosmic history when Saturn has rings at all

Saturn's rings are disappearing — NASA estimates they'll be gone within 100 million years — which means we happen to be alive during the brief window of cosmic history when Saturn has rings at all

The figure most people remember from the 2018 ring rain study is the Olympic swimming pool. Saturn, according to the team led by James O’Donoghue of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, loses an amount of water from its rings every half hour that would fill one. At that rate the rings have a finite shelf life. The paper, published in Icarus on 17 December 2018, put the ceiling at roughly 300 million years from ring rain alone. Add in the addition…