"The “ring rain” of material falling from Saturn’s rings into the planet’s atmosphere is a much more intense, contaminated downpour than scientists thought.
For decades, astronomers have suspected that Saturn’s rings pelt the planet with grains of water ice, but some of the final observations from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft provide the first detailed views of these celestial showers.
Ring rain is highly contaminated with organic matter and other molecules, and hammers Saturn at thousands of kilograms per second, researchers report in the Oct. 5 Science.
Water constituted only about 24 percent of the material tumbling from Saturn’s ring system into its atmosphere; the rest was methane, carbon monoxide, dinitrogen, ammonia, carbon dioxide and fragments of organic nanoparticles.
The ring rain’s diverse chemical composition “was a big surprise,” because remote observations show that Saturn’s ring system, on the whole, is almost entirely water ice, says Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker.
In addition to the ring rain’s chemistry, the Cassini observations also revealed how quickly this material is falling into Saturn’s atmosphere: between 4,800 and 45,000 kilograms per second.
Saturn’s rings probably haven’t sustained this rate of rainfall over the course of the planet’s history, he says. If that were the case, the little D ring would have long since eroded away."
ScienceNews
---OR----Saturn’s rings HAVE sustained this rate of rainfall BECAUSE Saturn IS NOT Millions or Billions of years old!
....by whom also he made the worlds; Hebrews 1:2
For decades, astronomers have suspected that Saturn’s rings pelt the planet with grains of water ice, but some of the final observations from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft provide the first detailed views of these celestial showers.
Ring rain is highly contaminated with organic matter and other molecules, and hammers Saturn at thousands of kilograms per second, researchers report in the Oct. 5 Science.
Water constituted only about 24 percent of the material tumbling from Saturn’s ring system into its atmosphere; the rest was methane, carbon monoxide, dinitrogen, ammonia, carbon dioxide and fragments of organic nanoparticles.
The ring rain’s diverse chemical composition “was a big surprise,” because remote observations show that Saturn’s ring system, on the whole, is almost entirely water ice, says Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker.
In addition to the ring rain’s chemistry, the Cassini observations also revealed how quickly this material is falling into Saturn’s atmosphere: between 4,800 and 45,000 kilograms per second.
Saturn’s rings probably haven’t sustained this rate of rainfall over the course of the planet’s history, he says. If that were the case, the little D ring would have long since eroded away."
ScienceNews
---OR----Saturn’s rings HAVE sustained this rate of rainfall BECAUSE Saturn IS NOT Millions or Billions of years old!
....by whom also he made the worlds; Hebrews 1:2
