Sharks are older than Saturn's rings

Saturn's rings are much younger than we thought.

by Mihai Andrei May 17, 2023
Edited and reviewed by Zoe Gordon

Some 450 million years ago, the world was a very different place. Invertebrates, namely mollusks and arthropods, dominated the oceans. The first land plants were just emerging. Trees didn’t exist. Dinosaurs were 230 million years away. In the seas, a group of jawed fish were just emerging. These fish, which we now call sharks, would stay at the top of the food chain to the current day, dominating ecosystems and withstanding some of our planet’s most devastating extinctions.

Sharks probably didn’t have telescopes and presumably, they didn’t care much about the night sky. But if they did, and had looked at Saturn, it would have looked very different than it does today. Specifically, it wouldn’t have had its distinctive rings.

If you thought this was about sharks and life on Earth — sorry about that. It’s about Saturn and its rings. The iconic rings weren’t always there. The rings are basically billions of particles of ice, remnants of comets, asteroids, or other things that broke up before they reached Saturn and were kept in place by the planet’s powerful gravity.

But these pieces of ice are also “polluted” by other types of material. While this only makes up less than 2% of the rings’ volume, it can offer clues as to how the rings formed.

More:
https://www.zmescience.com/science/sharks-are-older-than-saturns-rings/