Who Made Saturn's Rings?

Saturn wakes up, looks in the telescope... and her rings are GONE. They come back (they were only edge-on), but now she has a bigger question: who MADE them? Detective Timbre opens the case file. Three pieces of evidence, four suspects: born with them, a passing comet, a missing moon, and a crash between two moons. Then a 2024 study scratches the record, the rings turn out to be raining into Saturn, and Mars gets an unexpected inheritance. Nobody knows who made Saturn's rings. But we get to see them now. Case still open. Chapters: 0:00 My rings are gone! 1:08 The crime scene 2:21 Suspect 1: born with them 3:27 Suspect 2: the passing comet 4:19 Suspect 3: the missing moon 5:26 Suspect 4: the crash 6:23 Case reopened: the rings are raining 7:35 Case still open Science notes: - In March 2025 Earth saw Saturn's rings edge-on (ring-plane crossing); it happens roughly every 13-15 years. The main rings are about 270,000 km across but typically only about 10 m thick. - The rings are mostly water ice (well over 90%), from dust-sized grains to house-sized chunks, inside Saturn's Roche limit. Cassini's 2017 Grand Finale measured their mass: about 40% of the moon Mimas (Iess et al. 2019). - Where the rings came from is still unknown. The hypotheses in this video: rings as old as Saturn; a torn-apart comet or centaur (Dones 1991); ice stripped from a lost Titan-sized moon (Canup 2010); the lost moon "Chrysalis", whose loss may also explain Saturn's tilt (Wisdom et al. 2022); a collision of two Dione/Rhea-sized moons (Teodoro, Kegerreis et al. 2023, NASA + Durham simulations). Each is a model, not a proven history. - Young-ring evidence: clean, low-mass rings and the measured dust infall (Kempf et al. 2023: no more than a few hundred million years). A 2024 study (Hyodo, Genda & Madeira) argues that micrometeoroid impacts may vaporize instead of darkening the rings, so they could be old. Scientists still argue. - Ring rain: one team estimated an Olympic pool of water every hal