Saturn Is Losing Its Rings

Saturn's rings look permanent, but they are not. Ice from the rings is raining down into the planet, enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool every half an hour, and NASA scientists estimate the rings may have less than 100 million years left. They may also be young: only a few hundred million years old, around a planet four and a half billion years old. We show Saturn over La Palma tonight, with its rings tilted only eight degrees, why they seemed to vanish in 2025, what they are made of, how the ring rain works, Cassini's final orbits, and what Saturn may look like when they are gone. Sources: NASA (O'Donoghue et al., ring rain, 2018), NASA Cassini (rings), NASA Saturn facts, APOD (2025 November 16), University of Colorado Boulder (Kempf et al., 2023), JPL Horizons. Milky Way panorama: ESO/S. Brunier (CC BY 4.0). Earth: NASA Blue Marble. #saturn #space #astronomy