As if Times Weren’t Unsettling Enough, Saturn Is Losing Its Rings

If anything seemed solid in a melting and mutable world, surely it was the great big outer planets of the solar system. There they were, Saturn and Jupiter, stately if a little foreboding, hanging around close together, impossibly large and bright, in the Great Conjunction, as it was called, visible for the first time in decades four winters ago, in the pandemic year of 2020. You could go outside then and stare at the gassy planets on the empty streets at midnight, their presence suggesting, if not a benign purpose, then at least a superintending one—the permanence of the cosmos itself—while we chafed and fretted below.

But now news has leaked out—it has been known to astronomers for a while but only recently reached our shared, night-sky-gazers consciousness—that Saturn’s beautiful rings, the one true ornamental element in the solar system, are vanishing. “Ring rain,” it seems, is wasting them away in what is, for a cosmic event, a quick process. 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. “Saturn Is Losing Its Rings at Worst-Case-Scenario Rate,” an article published by nasa read, and a science Web site bid “Goodbye to Saturn’s Rings,” though the farewell taps will be heard for some time, since that “worst case” turns out to be about a hundred million years—not exactly what we mean by worst-case scenarios down here on Earth, where they tend to entail four-year cycles, if that.

The causes and consequences of ring rain are fascinating, if still a bit obscure to the non-astronomer, because they involve a complicated exchange between the surprisingly fragile ring system—first spotted by Galileo himself, back in the early seventeenth century—and the planet. For all the rings’ majesty and beauty, they’re mostly ice mixed with rocks. At times, ring particles take on an electrical charge (from the sun’s ultraviolet light, for instance). When this happens, they’re more susceptible to Saturn’s gravitational pull and can begin pelting into the planet’s atmosphere.

If that thought isn’t alarming enough, add to it that in 2025 we will be able to see what it will look like when Saturn’s rings are gone. That’s because in the coming year Saturn will tilt in a way that, from the point of view of earthlings, creates a startling trick of eye and angle that makes the rings invisible. We will be able to look that hundred million years ahead, at least for a while. (The rings should be back in sight in the next couple of years, or, at any rate, let’s hope so.)

One of the emerging truths of the cosmos is that some of the same laws of slow contingency and evolutionary drift, of vertiginously changing vantage points oscillating with incremental processes, that govern our paltry lives also affect the large stuff out there. What we see when we look up, like what we see when we look around, is not a well-ordered clockwork ticking its way toward eternity. It is a mix of short-lived illusions, long-lived evolutions, meaningless overlays—the constellations we love, after all, are just superimposed serendipities, stars at vastly different distances seen as one—lucky accidents and unforeseen developments. Some comfort can be found in the indifference of the cosmos to our stories; some other comfort lies in the thought that the cosmos tells stories much like our own.

It may turn out, for instance, that, as the physicist Lee Smolin has theorized, our universe has evolved on a Darwinian basis. Just as humans outcompete other creatures in the struggle for existence, some kinds of universes have outcompeted other kinds in the struggle for cosmological existence. Our universe, in this view, is a kind of successful predatory cosmos—it’s one that worked. After all, if we see a lion dining on a zebra, we can be sure that there were previous lions who dined on lots more zebras than other lions did to give birth to this one. So it is, it would appear, with the universe itself. Its existence is a proof of the success of this precise kind of universe in the struggle for existence with other, alternate universes.

And then let’s add to this confounding catalogue the truth that looking up at the night sky for comfort seems a little more implausible right now. As everyone knows, people in the neighboring state of New Jersey, right across the Hudson, have been spotting ominous squadrons of alien drones. Or, far more likely, spotting not ominous drones but familiar assortments of normal drones and passing airplanes and helicopters—and even planets and stars—that some people have spent too much time watching Fox News to have noticed before.

It is beyond strange that New Jersey was the site of another American panic to take place under uncertain skies in a deeply divided time, filled with looming fears of approaching fascism and America First ideology. That earlier incident was a result of Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” radio play, in 1938, which sent New Jerseyans, and not just New Jerseyans, racing into the streets in fear of an alien visitation.

The reversal, perhaps typical of our time, is that, whereas the Welles broadcast was a program that, heard indoors, thrust people in terror out-of-doors, our drone panic involves an outdoor occurrence that people race inside to make sense of. Or, rather, not to make sense of, with YouTube videos and social media amplifying, rather than easing, the panic.

Well, the rain it raineth every day, as Shakespeare noted, apparently even on Saturn. The cosmos remains too little comfort at this moment. In our skies as in our social lives, incremental change, like ring rain, seems to work slowly, while acts of frightening absolutism seem to happen overnight. Our hopes for the power of small transformations may be misplaced, while the power of the sudden apparition—The drones are here! The rings are gone!—seems overwhelming. Yet the slow force of small change really does alter Saturn’s rings, and what looks like an astonishing, radical amputation may turn out to be the trick of an angle and a passing happenstance of positioning. The coming year will be an interesting one, and not just in the night sky. ♦