An image of Saturn with its rings
Saturn's iconic rings are not always clearly visible from Earth. NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute
On Sunday afternoon, Saturn’s iconic rings vanished from our skies.
Don’t worry—the planet’s rings are still intact. But from Earth’s vantage point, a temporary phenomenon called a “ring plane crossing” is causing them to appear nearly invisible to our eyes.
Saturn completes an orbit around the sun every 29.4 years. Because the planet rotates on an axis of 26.7 degrees, our view of its rings changes depending on where the Earth and Saturn are in their orbits. Sometimes, we have a great view of the rings’ broad surface. In this case, we’re seeing just their narrow edge—and they reflect so little light that it’s as though they aren’t there.
“They literally almost disappear,” says Sean Walker, an associate editor at Sky & Telescope, to Denise Chow at NBC News. “Normally you see the rings around Saturn, but when you have an edge-on view, it looks like a hair-thin line of light just cutting across.”
Need a visual guide? “The best way to illustrate this is to get your sheet of paper, and hold it horizontally—parallel to the ground—at eye level,” astrophysicist Jonti Horner wrote in an article for the Conversation in 2023. “Now, move the paper down towards the ground a few inches. What do you see? The upper side of the paper comes into view. Move the paper back up, through your eye line, to hold it above you and you can see the underside of the paper. But as it passes through eye level, the paper will all but disappear.”
one view of Saturn with its rings appearing clearly, at a tilt in December 1994; and one view of Saturn with just a thin line passing through it in May 1995
The Hubble Space Telescope captured these two distinct views of Saturn, with a ring plane crossing depicted on the right. Reta Beebe (New Mexico State University), D. Gilmore, L. Bergeron (STScI), NASA/ESA, Amanda S. Bosh (Lowell Observatory), Andrew S. Rivkin (Univ. of Arizona/LPL), the HST High Speed Photometer Instrument Team (R.C. Bless, PI), and NASA/ESA
When this happens in the solar system, giving Earth the narrowest glimpse of the rings, it’s known as a ring plane crossing. The phenomenon also offers skywatchers and scientists an opportunity to get a better view of Saturn’s moons. Many of Saturn’s moons were actually discovered during ring plane crossings, including its largest, Titan.
“When we have these ring plane crossings, the light that normally reflects off Saturn’s rings is no longer glaring back toward Earth,” adds Walker to NBC News. “That means you can detect a lot more of the smaller moons.”
Right now, Saturn is near the sun from our perspective, making it tough for astronomers to see it at all. But in September, the planet will reach opposition—an alignment opposite the sun that offers the best time for viewing. The rings will gradually come back into full view, though they’re expected to appear narrow for another short period in November.
Ring plane crossings with Saturn happen every 13 to 15 years, so you’ll have a chance at seeing another one in 2038. At that time, the planet will be much more visible during the phenomenon.
After each of these crossings, Saturn’s “disappeared” rings will come back. But in millions of years, its rings will be gone forever. The chunks of rock and ice that make up the rings are being pulled into the planet by its gravity—scientists call this “ring rain.”
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“We estimate that this ‘ring rain’ drains an amount of water products that could fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool from Saturn’s rings in half an hour,” said James O’Donoghue, a planetary scientist previously at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in a 2018 statement.
In 2023, researchers estimated Saturn’s rings have somewhere between 15 million to 400 million years left before they disappear for good—and a second study found they might be much younger than astronomers thought.
Considering the planet’s vast age of roughly four billion years, “we’re quite lucky to see a ring in the first place,” Sascha Kempf, a physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder who led the second study, told Science News’ Nikk Ogasa at the time.