But later – hundreds of millions of years in the future – a permanent, virtually ringless Saturn will become real, thanks to another process called ring rain in which gravity pulls the rings apart and ...

E ring particles refer to the super small water ice particles in Saturn's rings. Potentially, the team reasons, some of those particles could be helping build the sheet covering the dark spot.

"In the end, micrometeoroid material (darkening material of rings), now in the form of nano-particles and ions, either slam into the planet or escape into Saturn's atmosphere or out into space.

A new study implies that in the past, moons in our solar system may have had rings just like planets do — deepening the ...

In 2004, when NASA's Cassini probe arrived to study Saturn, it discovered that the ice chunks and particles of the rings were free of the cosmic dust that scientists expected to find. Their ...

Ring rain is just what it sounds like: charged water particles leaking out of Saturn’s rings and raining down onto the planet, diminishing the rings at what astronomers say is an alarming pace.

They found that the resulting charged particles get sucked toward Saturn or out into space, keeping the rings spotless and challenging the baby rings theory. Their results appear in the journal ...

The particles that make up the rings are being ... A timeline like that means that none of us will actually be around to see Saturn in its future ring-less state, but that’s beside the point.

Saturn's spectacular rings may be far older than we thought ... scientists believed that its distinctive ring structure – made of ice particles and rock – was formed at the same time ...

They found that the resulting charged particles get sucked toward Saturn or out into space, keeping the rings spotless and challenging the baby rings theory. Their results appear in the journal ...

Moon Enceladus embedded in Saturn's E ring. The icy moon erupts with cryovolcanism that supplies the ring with ice particles. (NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute) Saturn, by contrast, is practically ...