Saturn's rings will disappear from view of ground-based telescopes in 2025. Here's why.

Saturn's famous rings are about to disappear.

No, not literally – that isn't projected to happen for hundreds of millions of years. But for astronomers and stargazers using ground-based telescopes, the gas giant's seven rings are about to be unobservable for a short time from Earth's vantage.

Why? Well, every 13-15 years, Saturn, the second largest planet in the solar system behind Jupiter, is angled in a way in which the edge of its thin rings are oriented toward Earth – effectively causing them to vanish temporarily from view.

Fortunately, those rings – thought to be remnants of space rocks like asteroids and comets – will soon reappear to ground observers here on Earth.

Here's what to know about when and why Saturn's rings regularly disappear from our view, and when we'll see them again.

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When will Saturn's rings disappear?

For the past few months, Saturn's rings have been appearing thinner and thinner to those using ground telescopes.

By March 2025, the rings will disappear entirely from view, according to Earth Sky, a website dedicated to astronomy. Though Saturn's rings will be visible again from Earth after March 2025, they'll temporarily disappear from view again in November when they appear to us at their narrowest.

What are Saturn's rings and why do they disappear?

Of course, the vanishing act is little more than an optical illusion to stargazers on Earth. If observed from the vantage point of space, the rings would still be all accounted for.

Astronomers believe Saturn accumulated the rings late in its life and maintains them in something of a balancing act – trapping them between the pull of the planet's gravity and their own orbital velocity that wants to fling them into the void of space.

While the rings, made of billions of small chunks of ice and rock coated in space dust, extend for up to 175,000 miles from the planet itself, they're remarkably close to one another. The largest gap, known as the Cassini Division, measures only 2,920 miles in width.

The rings' relative thinness and flatness is what allows them to vanish from view every few years due to both Saturn's and Earth's positions as the planets orbit the sun.

When will we see Saturn's rings again from Earth?

It won't be long before the rings will reappear to us here on Earth and they make the slow transition to their widest visibility by 2032.

But one day, Saturn’s rings really will disappear.

Observations from NASA’s Voyager 2 mission in 1981 allowed the U.S. space agency to release research in 2018 finding that the iconic rings are slowly vanishing as gravity pulls them into the planet in the form of dusty rain or ice particles. The process will take another 300 million years until the entire ring system is gone.

But the Cassini spacecraft, which spent years probing the planet, found that the rings could disappear even faster. Measuring ring-material detected by Cassini falling into Saturn’s equator allowed astronomers to give the rings another 100 million years to live.

This story has been updated to fix a typo.

Eric Lagatta covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach him at [email protected]

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Saturn's rings will disappear from view in 2025: Here's why