Want to hear a real mind-bender?
The rings of Saturn are super young. That is, by cosmic standards.
While our solar system as a whole is around 4.6 billion years old, the gorgeous rings engulfing the seventh planet are estimated to have only been around for a few hundred million. That’s well before human beings got here, so it’s always been encircled to us, but there truly was a time when it wasn’t, and there will be a time when it’s not again.
An artist’s impression of how Saturn’s rings may fade over time.
In fact, you may have seen some misleading memes or headlines lately that indicate the rings are disappearing! And they are – in another few hundred million years. But in 2025, they will become temporarily invisible, as The Conversation reports.
The rings themselves are very thin compared to the circumference of the gas giant, so we get our best view of them when they’re at the right angle. Both Earth and Jupiter have a tilted axis around which they rotate, so the relative viewing angles between the planets are constantly shifting.
Photo from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft showing a moon passing in front of a razor-thin edge-on display of rings.
Imagine the rings like a flat sheet. If the sheet is tilted toward you, you can see a lot of its surface area, even from a distance. But if the sheet is directly perpendicular to your eye, which is to say, edge-on, it quickly becomes invisibly slight.
That’s what’s happening to with Saturn in 2025, and it’s actually not that rare. In fact, it happens twice a year. Just not our years.
Remember that a year is defined as the time it takes a planet to make one full rotation around its home star. Saturn being much further out from our sun, its journey takes significantly longer. One Saturn year is roughly equivalent to 29.4 Earth years, and during that time, the conditions for an invisible ring viewing arise twice.
A diagram of the differing length of planet years according to distance from the star.
Exactly how long these windows apply depends on how powerful a telescope you’ve got – the biggest ones will be able to eek out a little ring detail again long before hobbyist models. But if you want to give it a go, your best bet is sometime in March of this year.
If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a second giant hole has opened up on the sun’s surface. Here’s what it means.