Another Idea Fails to Age Saturn’s Rings

Japanese scientists attempt to
blast the dirt off old ring particles
so that they stay young looking

 

As CEH has reported many times, Saturn’s rings look young. They appear to anywhere from 0.3% to 9% as old as Saturn, according to experts who believe that Saturn is 4.5 billion years old. This anomaly has caused much consternation among planetary scientists, but they have had to respect the data gathered by the Cassini spacecraft. One of several evidences of youth is that the rings should have gathered much more “dirt” (i.e., non-water impurities) from micrometeorites over millions and billions of years.

Now, Japanese scientists have come up with another idea to make the rings look younger than they believe they must be. Their computer model suggests that micrometeorites strike the ring particles so hard the dirt vaporizes. The hot smoke from impacts doesn’t land back on the icy ring particles. It wanders off, or becomes ionized, getting swept up by Saturn. But should Saturn help the rings look young by vacuuming away its dirt? Not even other ring specialists are ready to swallow this notion.

Nevertheless, the Deep-Time-loving press tried to give it a favorable hearing:

We might have been completely wrong about the origin of Saturn’s rings, new study claims (17 Dec 2024, Live Science). Reporter: Patrick Pester.

Saturn’s rings may be far older than we thought (17 Dec 2024, New Scientist). Reporter: Alex Wilkins.

Saturn’s rings could be much older than scientists first thought (17 Dec 2024, Space.com). Reporter: Charles Q. Choi.

How old are Saturn’s rings? Study suggests they could be 4.5 billion years old just like the planet (17 Dec 2024, Phys.org). Reporter: Marcia Dunn.

Pollution resistance of Saturn’s ring particles during micrometeoroid impact (16 Dec 2024, Ryuki Hyodo et al, Nature Geoscience). This is the paper with the details of the model proposing that the ring particles are “pollution resistant.” They say, “Thus we suggest that the apparent youth of Saturn’s rings could be due to pollution resistance, rather than indicative of young formation age.”

As usual, the damage was done by the headlines in the popular press. Only down the page of their columns did the reporters mention that ring experts like Sascha Kempf did not think Hyodo’s model substantially changed the evidence of ring youth (see 12 May 2023). Wilkins admitted:

Sascha Kempf at the University of Colorado Boulder, a member of the team that calculated the earlier, much younger estimate for the age of Saturn’s rings, says that he and his colleagues used a more complex method than just the ring pollution efficiency, considering how long it takes for material to arrive at the rings and disappear. The value calculated by Hyodo and his colleagues shouldn’t change the overall findings for the age, says Kempf. “We are pretty certain that this is not really telling us that we have to go back to the drawing board.”

The mere suggestion in the headlines that the rings might be billions of years old gave an unearned sigh of relief to the moyboys. But since the reporters didn’t do their job of asking hard questions and pointing out flaws in the paper, we’ll have to set an example for them and do it ourselves. Here is Wilkins’ summary of the Hyodo model:

The researchers found these speedy collisions could generate temperatures of more than 17,540 degrees F (9,725 degrees C), leading the micrometeoroids to vaporize. This gas would then expand, cool and condense within Saturn’s magnetic field, producing electrically charged ions and microscopic particles.

The simulations then revealed these charged particles mostly either collide with Saturn, escape its gravitational pull, or get dragged into the planet’s atmosphere. Very little of this material appeared to pollute the rings, leaving them relatively clean, the scientists found.

“A clean appearance does not necessarily mean the rings are young,” Hyodo said.

As an exercise, before we critique this claim, see if you can find any flaws in it. Then scroll down and read our analysis:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Logic: It doesn’t necessarily mean the rings are billions of years old, either.

Models vs reality: Not all micrometeorites strike the rings at 67,100 mph (108,000 km/h) like Hyodo’s model simulated. Depending on the source and angle, surely some of the dirt would have remained on the ring particles and accumulated over time.

Inconsistency: Why would the impacts vaporize the meteorite material but not the icy ring particles? The rings would have been obliterated from these impacts in far less than 4.5 billion years. Kempf’s 2023 paper makes this point (see quote at end of our 12 May 2023 article). Even if the rings started larger, they would have quickly reduced to their current size and “would absorb a much higher-than-observed volume fraction of pollutants during” its lifetime.

Special pleading: Hyodo et al. assume the dirt would get swept into Saturn or blown out of the rings. Why wouldn’t much of it fall back onto the rings? That’s what happens to the “spoke” material that becomes electrostatically levitated above the ring plane, according to one explanation for the radial spokes found by Voyager and Cassini.

Selective condensation: The paper says that “The silicate vapour is more prone to condensation than water vapour,” but that’s not the whole issue. High-speed impacts should have blasted ring material out of the rings whether or not the water vapor condensed. Cassini observed “ring rain” falling into Saturn “at a prodigious rate” (see quote in our 12 May 2023 article). High speed impacts remove more material than they deposit.

Oversimplification: The model made arbitrary judgments, such as “The impact velocity was 30, 40 or 50 km s⁻¹, and head-on impact was assumed.” They only considered the vaporization of silicates, but not tougher materials like iron. Other simplifications were assumed to make the computer modeling easier. Reality has no obligation to conform to the ease of a computer simulation.

Passing the buck: The team left complications in their model to futureware, e.g.: “if the impactor is also porous, there is no guarantee that vapour production will increase. We leave this complex investigation to future studies.” Another: “The thermodynamic behaviour of a mixed vapour containing both H₂O and SiO₂ may fall between the characteristics observed in the pure H₂O and pure SiO₂ cases. These unexplored complicated scenarios offer valuable questions for future studies.” Another: “Material properties, such as SiO₂ and H₂O ice, are also important since their sputtering and radiolysis reaction efficiencies differ. These investigations will be explored in future research.”

Card stacking: Hyodo’s paper only considered the problem of dirt contamination from micrometeorites. That’s only one of several forces acting to destroy the rings:

• Collisional spreading: As ring particles collide, they tend to spread out, but Voyager and Cassini observed high levels of structure in the rings.
• Sunlight pressure: the Poynting-Robertson effect causes ring particles to lose energy and spiral into Saturn.
• Gas drag: Saturn’s outer atmosphere slows down ring particles so that they lose energy and spiral into Saturn.
• Sputtering: Impacts at the atomic level erode ring particles.

Ignoring evidence: The authors completely ignored the ephemeral rings at Saturn, like the F-ring, G-ring, E-ring (from Enceladus geysers), and Phoebe Ring. These rings are composed of micron-sized particles that quickly dissipate unless replenished. They also failed to apply the same model to ephemeral rings at Uranus and Neptune.

Biased assumptions: Hyodo et al began by presupposing that the rings are as old as Saturn (4.5 billion years according to their Deep Time bias) and set out to prove it. They were not seeking truth in an unbiased manner. Their paper was an effort at “theory rescue” for Deep Time. As shown in the point above, they ignored other significant factors that preclude billions of years for the rings.

For these and other reasons, the Hyodo et al. paper should be disregarded as too little too late. The rings are young. And if they are far younger than Saturn—as all the American ringmasters have shown—then it is one of many strong evidences that the solar system is young.