"Young AtmosphereThis is not Cassini’s only finding that indicates the rings are young. The brightness of the rings also remains unexplained. They should be much darker by now, as contaminants collect to make them ‘dirty’ over time.
Other forces such as sputtering (erosion on the atomic scale), sunlight pressure, micrometeoroid bombardment and gas drag take their toll. And as Cassini sampled Saturn’s atmosphere on its final plunge, the ion and neutral mass spectrometer and cosmic dust analyzer confirmed that ring material is falling into the planet. Nature says that mission scientists had expected to find mostly water ice—
But instead of water, Cassini found a witch’s brew of chemicals, including methane, a molecule that could be carbon monoxide and more-complex molecules. The concentrations of these chemicals are highest around Saturn’s equator and at high altitudes, which suggests that the material is shedding off the planet’s rings.The article goes on to say that the particles were not predicted. If they are indeed coming from the rings, how long can the rings supply the molecules?
By analyzing the types of materials that could be coming off the rings, Perry’s team concluded that they must be fragments of tiny dust particles, which measure just 1 to 10 nanometres across but are relatively heavy. When these particles spiralled off the rings and slammed into Cassini’s mass spectrometer, they shattered into smaller pieces.So there is “far more than just water around” in the upper atmosphere. The density of infall from the rings must be extremely sparse, as evidenced by the fact that Cassini survived 22 high-dive orbits between Saturn and the rings. Nevertheless, 4.5 billion years is a long time for material to spiral out of the rings into a giant planet with a big, gravitational vacuum cleaner." CEH
Exactly how those particles make that journey from the rings to the atmosphere remains to be seen. “We have a lot of work to do to understand how they are getting in there,” Perry said. “None of the models predict this.”
...by whom also he made the worlds;
Hebrews 1:2