Enlarge / “Backlit” image of Saturn and its rings, taken by the Cassini spacecraft in 2006.NASA/Public domain
Astronomers had long assumed that Saturn’s distinctive rings formed around the same time as the planet some 4.5 billion years ago in the earliest days of our Solar System. That assumption received a serious challenge from a 2019 analysis of data collected by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, suggesting that the rings were just 10 million to 100 million years ago—a mere blink of an eye on cosmic time scales. Now, a fresh analysis of data on how much dust has accumulated on the rings
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