Saturn. There's no denying, it's gorgeous. And for 13 years the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, a joint mission by NASA, the ESA and the ASI, orbited the ringed planet, sending back stunning images of the rings, the many moons and moonlets, and the planet surface, as well as copious data that has changed astronomers understanding of Saturn and its system. Some of that data, released recently, shows that those iconic rings aren't as massive as once thought — which also implies they're not terribly old either, and could disappear in a few hundred million years. On a cosmic time scale, blink and you miss them! We're lucky to be here to witness Saturn's magnificence.

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Syzygy is produced by Dr Chris Stewart and co-hosted by Dr Emily Brunsden from the Department of Physics at the University of York.

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Things we talk about in this episode:

The SuThe research in this episode: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/01/16/science.aat2965?rss=1
Article about the research: https://www.universetoday.com/141272/saturns-rings-are-only-10-to-100-million-years-old/
The Cassini-Huygens mission: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/cassini/overview/
Images from Cassini: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/cassini/galleries/images/
Farewell, Cassini: https://www.engadget.com/2017/09/15/cassini-end-of-mission-rip/
Mimas, the Death Star moon: https://www.universetoday.com/15436/saturns-moon-mimas/
Comet smashes into Jupiter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker–Levy_9
How long is a day on Saturn? https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7316