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Why Saturn’s rings will appear to have vanished this Sunday

The debris from this event created Saturn’s signature rings. It is possible that other gas giants like Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune also had rings once

Saturn eclipsing the Sun in 2016. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

3 min readNew DelhiNov 23, 2025 02:49 PM IST First published on: Nov 23, 2025 at 02:49 PM IST

There are few sights in the Solar System as majestic as the rings of Saturn. But on Sunday (November 23), these rings will “disappear” — though only briefly.

While the vanishing will not be total, it could be a rare chance to take in such an event, Damian Peach, an English astrophotographer, told The New York Times.

Here is a look at why Saturn’s rings will appear to vanish.

An optical illusion

It is not as if the rings will cease to exist. Their “disappearance” — when viewed from Earth — will be an optical illusion. Saturn, which is tilted at an angle of 26.73 degrees, takes about 29.4 Earth years to complete a single orbit of the Sun.

This means that for half of a Saturn year (roughly 15 years), the gas giant is tilted towards the Sun, and for the other half it is tilted away from it. Its rings, too, are tilted at the same angle, and as the planet revolves, they appear to change their orientation when viewed from Earth.

Every 13 to 15 years, the edge of Saturn’s rings aligns directly with Earth. This is what will happen in March 2025 when only the edges of the ring will be visible from our planet. Since Saturn’s rings are very thin — just tens of metres thick in most places — at this position, they will reflect very little light, essentially making them invisible. (Imagine viewing the edge of a thin sheet of paper from a great distance.) But as Saturn continues to go around the Sun, its rings will gradually reappear.

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But rings won’t last forever

NASA confirmed in 2018 that Saturn will indeed lose its rings for good. In fact, Saturn’s rings are constantly being pulled towards the planet because of its gravity and magnetic field. “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,” NASA scientist James O’Donoghue said in 2018. At this rate, Saturn will completely lose its rings in the next 300 million years — or perhaps sooner.

Data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft revealed that Saturn’s rings are made of billions of chunks of ice and rock, whose size varies from as small as grains of dust to as large as mountains. According to the current consensus, the rings evolved just 100 million years ago due to the collision of two icy moons.

The debris from this event created Saturn’s signature rings. It is possible that other gas giants like Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune also had rings once. Today, they have only thin ringlets, hard to capture even with a telescope.

Saturn, on the other hand, possesses rings that span a massive distance — nearly five times the diameter of Earth. There are seven major ring divisions, each possessing a complex structure.