Are you an amateur stargazer? Prepare yourself for an unusual sight in the night skies by the time six months go by from today. Or, perhaps it’s better called an unusual “non-sight”: Saturn’s rings will disappear.
They won’t dematerialize or fly off into space though. The well-known planetary rings will only appear to disappear because of the way the earth and Saturn will be aligned to each other starting in early 2025. At that time, the distant planet will be positioned so that the rings will be seen “edge-on” from earth. Imagine looking at a piece of paper in front of you while someone rotates it so that only the edge is visible. That’s what’s going to happen to our view of Saturn, making the rings impossible to see from Earth.
One of the latest forecasts says the rings will disappear from optical view by March 23, 2025. As Saturn’s orientation in the sky changes, the rings will become visible again for a time before going out of sight again in November of next year. This is part of a periodic cycle for Saturn, whose orientation to Earth changes every 13 to 16 years, causing the famous rings to go dark for a time.
The most recent ring disappearance happened in 2009. Those who want to witness the vanishing act will have to watch the skies next year, or wait until 2027 or 2028 for the next planetary realignment.
The disappearance of the rings has brought surprising benefits to astronomers. Saturn has an incredible 148 moons, and 13 of them were found during “ring plane crossings,” as the reorientation is called. These moons are Titan, Enceladus, and Mimas.
More, the 1966 ring crossing led to the discovery of the very outermost ring around Saturn, called the E ring, which no one knew existed prior to the event. Unlike the famous and clearly visible rings, the E ring is not well-defined and doesn’t sit in a flat plane like the others. Instead, it’s described as a faint “donut” around the planet.
Saturns’ rings are so famous that images and icons of the planet have been used for decades in logos and science fiction branding, as they sight has become virtually synonymous with the idea of “outer space” itself. While they appear solid to distant observers, if humans were able to travel to the planet the rings would look more like a spread-out debris field of rocks and ice.
And despite how they appear, the rings are only about the thickness of a football field.
