After Six Years, Saturn’s Rings Confounds and Delights

The Cassini mission has produced an astounding array of observations about Saturn this past six years. It has confounded those who thought it would solve the mysteries of it’s origin.  In science, “An Evolving View of Saturn’s Dynamic Rings” reveals some interesting observations…

“We review our understanding of Saturn’s rings after nearly 6 years of observations by the Cassini spacecraft.  Saturn’s rings are composed mostly of water ice but also contain an undetermined reddish contaminant.”

“The rings exhibit a range of structure across many spatial scales; some  of this involves the interplay of the fluid nature and the self-gravity of innumerable orbiting centimeter- to meter-sized particles, and the effects of several peripheral and embedded moonlets, but much remains unexplained.”

“A few aspects of ring structure change on time scales as short as days.  It remains unclear whether the vigorous evolutionary processes  to which the rings are subject imply a much younger age than that of the solar system.  Processes on view at Saturn have parallels in circumstellar disks.”

Noticed how “evolution” is thrown in there time and time again, because what they observed were very short lifetimes of particles that make up Saturn’s rings which cannot be concluded as primordial. These particles move very fast compared to Saturn – about 20 km/sec, but collisions between them are very slight (0.01 to 0.1 cm/sec).

Some faint rings that were observed in 1981 during Voyager’s visit have changed, “D ring and inner C ring display a vertical corrugation that may have been generated only 25 years ago.” Dynamical effects that take place, happens in a matters of days or hours. For example, the F-ring which has a series of ringlets outside the main rings, where streamers of material get pulled out when the small moon Prometheus passes by.

This indeed is very interesting data which verifies creationism. So are evolutionary scientists better off now with six years of observational data? In one way, “yes” because the measurements are much more accurate but the rings themselves, “no.” So they are currently working on an explanation that would attempt to bring back the data into their framework.

The reason why the rings look young is because they are young! Isn’t science suppose to follow the evidence on where it may lead? They will postulate on unobservable entities which will give them an easier explanation. But science should remain real rather than fictional.