--- title: Saturn Is Losing its Rings Due to 'Ring Rain,' Study Finds description: 'Ring rain' is taking a steady toll canonical: https://time.com/5482631/saturn-losing-rings/ author: Jeffrey Kluger article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2018-12-18T16:55:10.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:53:03.160Z article:section: Science og:title: Take a Good Look at Saturn While You Can. It's Losing its Rings og:description: Saturn's "ring rain" will take a fatal toll on the iconic celestial sight og:url: https://time.com/5482631/saturn-losing-rings/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt5f3379835f913486/698941bedb29876a522617a0/Saturn.jpg?branch=production&width=894&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 894 og:image:height: 503 og:image:alt: Nothing good lasts forever: Saturn and it's (for now) rings, photographed during the Voyager missions og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Take a Good Look at Saturn While You Can. It's Losing its Rings twitter:description: Saturn's "ring rain" will take a fatal toll on the iconic celestial sight twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt5f3379835f913486/698941bedb29876a522617a0/Saturn.jpg?branch=production&width=894&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Take a Good Look at Saturn Before It's Too Late, Because It's Losing Its Rings > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: September 2026. ## TIME Newsletters: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition TIME publishes seven free email newsletters, written and edited by TIME journalists, reaching more than 1.1 million engaged readers. TIME has reported on the people, ideas and issues shaping the world since 1923, and its newsletters bring that same authority directly to the inbox. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=87a19cf7-679b-49b6-8ef3-6177715c4b49&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Highlights: See Live Views of Saturn in Opposition [Watch (HLS stream): Highlights: See Live Views of Saturn in Opposition](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/S41zhrfM.m3u8) (3:21)  _Published 2015-05-23. Highlights from SLOOH's live broadcast of the planet hitting its opposition on May 22, 2015._  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Dec 18, 2018 4:55 PM UTC  Nothing good lasts forever: Saturn and its (for now) rings, photographed during the Voyager missions Nothing good lasts forever: Saturn and its (for now) rings, photographed during the Voyager missions JPL  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Dec 18, 2018 4:55 PM UTC It ain’t St. Louis without the Gateway Arch, it ain’t Mount Rushmore without the Presidents, and it sure ain’t Saturn without the rings. That, at least, is how it’s always seemed—but things are apparently changing. According to a new study published in the journal [_Icarus_](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0019103518302999?via%3Dihub), Saturn could be largely ringless in as little as 100 million years. Among astronomers, the smart betting has never been that Saturn’s rings would live forever. The diameter of the ring system is huge: 170,000 miles, or almost three-quarters of the distance from the Earth to the moon. But it’s also as little as 30 feet thick. The rings are made of billions of particles of ice and rock, some boulder-sized, but others microscopically tiny. In the dynamic, high-energy environment of Saturn, it was always a question whether so diaphanous a structure could survive. And as long ago as 1980 and 1981, when Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 reconnoitered Saturn, the evidence began suggesting that the answer was no. Those spacecraft observed suspicious variations in both the electrical charge in Saturn’s ionosphere and the thickness of its rings, as well as dark-colored bands running around the planet at higher latitudes. A [1986 paper in the journal _Geophysical Research Letters_](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/GL013i008p00773) sought to explain this, theorizing that the ring particles were becoming entrained in Saturn’s magnetic field, plunging toward the planet and creating what amounted to a “ring rain,” which cleared away haze and created the signature lines. The rings, the thinking at that point went, would likely be gone in a maximum of 300 million years or, in a worst case scenario, just 100 million. That theory was _just_ a theory, but the new findings—based on ground-based observations by Keck Observatory telescopes on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea Mountain—may confirm it. The research, led by post-doctoral fellow James O’Donoghue of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, relied principally on scanning Saturn’s atmosphere for the infrared signature of a three-atom hydrogen ion known as H3+. O’Donoghue and his colleagues theorized that the ring rain begins when ring particles become electrically charged, either by ultraviolet energy from the sun or by plasma—hot, charged gas generated when micrometeoroids bombard Saturn’s atmosphere. Once the particles are energized, they react to Saturn’s magnetic field and ride the high-latitude lines of attraction down into the atmosphere. Such a bombardment should energize H3+ ions in the atmosphere, and that energy should be visible in the infrared spectrum. The Keck instruments detected precisely that. Worse for Saturn, the ring erosion may be even more severe than the Hawaii research suggests. In October, [NASA released findings](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/groundbreaking-science-emerges-from-ultra-close-orbits-of-saturn) from the hair-raising dive its Cassini spacecraft made between the innermost edge of Saturn’s rings and the uppermost reaches of its atmosphere, shortly before its planned suicide plunge into the planet in September of 2017\. The spacecraft detected ring rain not only where the Keck study did, but at the equator too. “We estimate that \[higher-latitude\] ‘ring rain’ drains an amount of water products that could fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool from Saturn’s rings in half an hour,” said O’Donoghue in a statement that accompanied the release of the new study. “From this alone, the entire ring system will be gone in 300 million years, but add to this the Cassini-spacecraft measured ring-material detected falling into Saturn’s equator, and the rings have less than 100 million years to live. This is relatively short, compared to Saturn’s age of over 4 billion years.” Both findings help answer another mystery: whether Saturn was born with its rings or acquired them later in its life, possibly by the collision of icy moons that were orbiting the planet. The transient nature of the rings established by the recent studies suggests that they were indeed a later accessory, since their very fragility makes it unlikely they could have the lasted the roughly 4.5 billion years from Saturn’s birth until now. If O’Donoghue is right about the 100 million-year timeline, humanity should be grateful that we came along now, in time to see the rings before they’re gone. Of course, it’s also possible we came along too late: Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune all have faint and fragmentary ring systems, suggesting that they may once have been as gaudily decorated as Saturn is today—a solar system spectacle that came and went before we ever got a glimpse of it. ## Transcript Hello, and welcome to another live show here on Slooh. com. My name is Will Gator and tonight we're celebrating that most of beautiful of all the planets. The ringed world Saturn. But why is tonight special? Well, because in the build up to the this show we've been talking about Saturn as being Opposition tonight. What does that mean? Well it means the Sun and the Earth and Saturn are forming a straight line in space. So that, if you look in the opposite direction from the Sun. You'll see Saturn. Or put another way, as the Sun sets, Saturn rises. When the Sun is at it's lowest point, Saturn is in the opposite part of the sky. At its highest point. And just as the sun rises, that's where Saturn sets. So it's opposite the sun. That's the straight line and then that's the occasion when Saturn is closest. Today's the day. And tonight's the night. And presumably that means it's a great time to observe it. Yes it's at its largest of the year. And more than that its rings although they look edgewise in this Cassini image are actually tilted now very favorably towards us. So, we see the rings beautifully. It's stunning you can see at a glance we see that the outer most ring. The A ring is darker than the rest of the ring, that's obvious. We can see the separation, the black thin gap, it's less than one arc second, by the way, in size which means it's really hard to see but we can see it clearly through the great Slooh telescope tonight that separates that outer most thin but darker A ring. From the widest ring, the main ring, the B ring. That's the wide ring and now look where it passes in front of Saturn, right in the middle of the image. You can see that there's even a semi- transparent ring. That's the C ring, or crepe ring, and it's not opaque enough to completely block out Saturn. You're gonna still see Saturn through it a little bit, the body of Saturn. But you can nonetheless see that there is that third ring there. So we're seeing all the detail. You know, when you're looking through a great telescope, that's what you're looking for. The outermost ring, the Cassini Division, the C Ring, the white belt that encircles its equator, and the dark polar region and we've got it all tonight. These amazing pictures of the storm actually, at the north pole. And that is Saturn, as we were talking to Professor Lunean earlier. It's just full of these unusual, weird, bizarre sort of features isn't it? I'm almost speechless, I should be speechless because when you're faced with great beauty like this, if you visit the Grand Canyon or if you see a total eclipse of the sun you don't wanna be yakking. Because it's almost a sacred experience. It's so beautiful. And so when you ask me my thoughts, it's more like my non- thoughts. 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