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LORD  OF  THE  RINGS!

Good afternoon (or whatever the time of day it is when you read this)!

I am home after a 12 day vacation/work spree. I had a most lovely time down south in Florida, USA with my sister and some of our old friends. It was a much needed vacation to rest my mind and body. Then off I went to Ohio and Southern Arizona (both in the USA) for book presentations. I really enjoyed that too at least the first one. Not so much the

Galileo saw the rings as "ears"

second as there were a lot of people there that did not like my books because the novels are Christian. But now I’m home and getting back in the swing of things. Can anybody relate?

So, speaking of out lying areas, I found this fantastic article on the rings of Saturn. I’ve always wondered about them because they are so beautiful and delicate and yet we can see them here all the way to earth with just binoculars and of course telescopes. As a matter of fact Galileo, who first discovered Saturn, called the rings “ears” as that is what they looked like as he peered through his primitive telescope. We have learned so much more since then.

In 1997 the Cassini-Huygens mission was funded and the

Cassini spacecraft and the Huygens module it carried started their journey to Saturn. In 2017 the Cassini spacecraft finished a number of dangerous passes in between the inner rings of Saturn and the planet. For a long time scientists have speculated what these rings were made of and how they got there. Better telescopes than Galileo’s have shown “thousands of rings, nested closely together. And instead of being solid, the rings are composed of billions of particles of dust, rock, and ice, all orbiting the planet together. Some are as small as a grain of sand; others are as

large as a building. The rings orbit at different speeds, yet they are so stable and unique that each ring and gap between the rings has its own name.The relative thinness is astounding. If Saturn’s rings were as wide as San Francisco, they’d be paper thin. People on earth see the rings only because God gave the planet a tilted axis. What process could possibly produce—and maintain—these seemingly delicate features? ‘Saturn’s rings are more than just belts of particles orbiting the planet,’ says Spike Psarris, a former engineer in the NASA space program who has been watching the Cassini mission closely as a creationist. ‘There are spokes in the rings, like wheels. Some rings are even braided. Nobody expected these features in the rings. It’s as if somebody created them to delight and fascinate us.’ …“The observed changes in Saturn’s rings during the

Cassini mission showed that Saturn’s rings are far younger than the 4.5 billion years most planetary scientists think,” observes Danny Faulkner, another creation astronomer (at Answers in Genesis) who has been following Cassini. ‘To rectify this, they now suggest that Saturn’s rings resulted from the recent tidal disruption of a satellite. In other words, Saturn’s strong tidal forces must have torn apart one of its satellites.’ However, since all four of the outer planets have rings, it is highly improbable that this happened recently to all of them.”¹ 

The arrow points to the small “star" which is actually earth as seen from Saturn

During its final passes through the rings, Cassini measured their gravitational pull and confirmed they’re too light to have lasted billions of years. Furthermore, measurements of the dust coming from the outer solar system show that the icy rings are too clean to be billions of years old. ‘There’s not much you can do about it. It has to be young,’ concludes Sascha Kempf, a space physicist, in a Science report. ‘I’m back to square one,’ admits planetary scientist Larry Esposito, who acknowledges that the existence of Saturn’s rings seems ‘lucky.’ ”²  

After gathering this wealth of knowledge for us (and much

more) the Cassini space craft plunged into Saturn’s upper atmosphere and disintegrated in the extreme heat on September 15, 2017. What wonderful addition to our understanding and to God’s glory this mission has accomplished. 

If you have never seen Saturn and it’s rings in real life, I urge you to find someone with binoculars or a telescope and see for yourself the wonders of the glory of the heavens!

Until next week, take care and God bless,

Willow Dressel

References: 

^1,2https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/solar-system/saturn-jewel-creators-showcase/?utm_source=articlesmedia&utm_medium=email&utm_content=1-banner-image&utm_campaign=20180224&mc_cid=3a42492c9c&mc_eid=ec76e61712 

All photos were taken from Cassini spacecraft.