News Planetary Science

Saturn’s rings may be no more than 400 million years old

The earliest trilobites may have evolved before Saturn donned its icy hoops

An image of Saturn and its rings.

Saturn’s icy, ethereal rings cast a shadow on the planet in this picture captured by NASA’s now-defunct Cassini spacecraft.

JPL-Caltech/NASA, Space Science Institute

By Nikk Ogasa

Saturn’s rings might have formed while trilobites scuttled about on Earth. Space dust has been accumulating on the icy halos for no more than 400 million years, researchers report in the May 12 Science Advances.

The 4.5-billion-year-old planet appears to have acquired its iconic ornamentation relatively recently, says physicist Sascha Kempf of the University of Colorado Boulder.