Saturn is losing its rings at a shockingly fast rate

Science Alert
All the planets in our Solar System have their charms, but few are as flashy and iconic as Saturn’s glorious rings. But, like everything in the Universe, they’re not going to last forever – and now planetary scientists have discovered that they’re disappearing at an incredibly fast rate. Well, fast in planetary terms. The rings could disintegrate and fall into Saturn in as little as 100 million years’ time, in a process dubbed ‘ring rain’. The discovery was made based on observations from NASA’s probes Voyager 1 and 2, which had encounters with Saturn on their way to the outer Solar System in November 1980 and August 1981, respectively.
Combining these with observations from Cassini, in which it analysed the material falling from Saturn’s rings down to the planet, has allowed astronomers to calculate exactly how fast the rings are disintegrating.
As it turns out, it’s as fast as the maximum rate in the range originally predicted by Voyager.
“We estimate that this ‘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 planetary scientist James O’Donoghue of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
“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.”