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Saturn's rings young.
Aug 16
Creation scientists have maintained that we live in a young Solar System, so it is no surprise that the planet Saturn is proving this to be correct.
The rings of Saturn have been known of since telescopes began peering at the heavens. Galileo first spotted them in 1610. Since that time, astronomers have learned more and more about Saturn's most striking feature, from the material that makes up the rings to the forces that jostle that material around.
But two of the most basic-sounding pieces of information about Saturn’s rings — their mass and age — remain something of a mystery. Astronomers hope that this mystery will be solved, or at least better understood, with the help of NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which has spent the last six years exploring the Saturn's system. Cassini is now in its extended mission, and has several maneuvers and observations planned that scientists hope will help settle the questions of just how old Saturn's rings are and how much material is in them.
RINGS ARE STILL THERE:
For decades astronomers have thought that the rings were old. This notion was challenged when NASA's Voyager spacecraft flew by the ringed giant in the early 1980s and gathered data on the planet, its many moons and its ring system. Through the Voyager observations, scientists found that complex processes were going on in the rings that make it very hard to understand how [the rings] could be that old.
These processes involve the gravitational pushes and pulls that Saturn's moons and rings exert on each other. These processes should push Saturn's small moons out of the ring system and pull the rings in toward the planet. But if the ring system was as old, this should have happened long ago.
"The processes are going so fast that they would be all finished — the rings would be gone," said Larry Esposito of the University of Colorado at Boulder, the principal investigator of Cassini's Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) instrument.
When Cassini arrived at Saturn in 2004, its observations showed that the processes churning up the rings were going at an even faster rate than was indicated by the Voyager data, Adjusting the age of the rings accordingly would make them younger than the Voyager exploration era. This would show that Saturn is not winding down; meaning it is extremely young.
RINGS NOT POLLUTED:
The rings of Saturn are at least 90 percent water ice, observations have found. But, like other things in the solar system, Saturn's rings are under constant bombardment by interplanetary debris, which is about 60 percent carbon and rock,
Over time, the meteorite debris raining down on the rings would "pollute" the water ice, making it increasingly less pure. The rings would get dirtier. But the bulk of the rings are still largely water ice, suggesting that the rings haven't been around long enough to be highly polluted, which in turn suggests they're young.
The scriputre says "the heavens decalre the glory of God". The rings of Saturn not only remind us of God's glory, but confirms God's word about his creation revealed in Genesis 1.
Book Creation Speaker Larry Dye the Creation Guy for Creation Seminars.
Book at tour at the Creation Discovery Centre, a creation museum located in Bow Island, Alberta, Canada.
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