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tonyPick [soylentnews.org] writes:

At The Conversation is a summary of a recent study on the age of Saturn's moons [theconversation.com], which claims that many of the many of Saturn’s moons formed as recently as about 100m years ago – when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.

It has long been thought that nearly all of the major moons of our solar system’s giant planets were born from the cloud of gas and dust surrounding each planet as it grew. That would make them the same age as their host planet – 4.5 billion years (the age of the solar system). However, these planets also have tiny moons that they acquired later, such as captured asteroids and comets in outer orbits, and chunks of debris from collisions in inner orbits.

But the new study now suggests that most of Saturn’s main moons are also young. The researchers deduced this from observations of the tidal relationships of Saturn’s principal moons. They found that if the medium-sized moons, such as Tethys, Dione and Rhea, had existed for billions of years, they ought to have influenced each other’s orbits much more than they have.

A more detailed summary at the SETI Institute [seti.org] is available, as well as a preprint of the paper at arXiv.org [arxiv.org]

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