A new fine-toothed examination of NASA's Cassini spacecraft's observations of Saturn has revealed that its breathtaking rings are "vintage goods" stemming from our solar system's birth, and are actually the origins of one of Saturn's moons.
The results, naturally, help scientists better understand the components involved in the life cycle of our solar system.
"Studying the Saturnian system helps us understand the chemical and physical evolution of our entire solar system," said Gianrico Filacchione, lead author on the study detailing the findings from Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics. "We know now that understanding this evolution requires not just studying a single moon or ring, but piecing together the relationships intertwining these bodies."
Cassini's observations showed that there was simply too much water ice making up the rings' compositions to have been the result of comets or other recent phenomena. The researchers concluded that it must have been part of the original protoplanetary nebula - the cloud of material from which our solar system sprung forth from. This makes the rings around 4 billion years old.
But that's not all the researchers found. It turns out that Prometheus, one of Saturn's moons, comes from Saturn's rings.
The similar reddish tint suggests that Prometheus is constructed from material in Saturn's rings," said co-author of the study Bonnie Buratti, from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
"Scientists had been wondering whether ring particles could have stuck together to form moons -- since the dominant theory was that the rings basically came from satellites being broken up. The coloring gives us some solid proof that it can work the other way around, too."
You can read the full published study in The Astrophysical Journal.
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