Saturn
Overview
Saturn, the sixth planet from the Sun, is the second largest planet in the solar system. Like Jupiter, Saturn is also a gas giant, and it is mostly composed of hydrogen and helium.
Saturn was named after the Roman god of agriculture and wealth who was also the father of Jupiter, the king of all the Roman gods.
Saturn's Rings
Even though all the four giant planets have ring system, none of them is as spectacular and complex as Saturn’s ring system. The rings of Saturn are not only unattached to the planet but also separated from each other, and they all move with different speeds around the planet.
Saturn’s rings consist of billions of chunks of water-ice (99%) and rocks. There are several theories on how this ring system formed. Scientists believe that it could have formed from the pieces of comets, asteroids, or the shattered pieces of Saturn’s moons.
Though Saturn’s ring system extends up to 282,000 kilometers from the planet, its thickness (vertical height) is incredibly thin: only about 10 meters.
A to G are the names for these rings. The closest to the planet is the D ring, and the farthest is the G ring.
The main rings are A, B and C. Other rings are fainter. Take a look at the picture above, and we can realize how complex and spectacular the rings are.
Interesting Facts
Moons: According to NASA, Saturn has 53 confirmed moons and 29 provisional moons. The largest of all the Saturn’s moons is Titan. It is a planet sized world with a substantial atmosphere whose surface pressure is 1.5 bar (1 bar is the atmospheric pressure on Earth at sea level). Titan’s atmosphere consists of mostly nitrogen (98.4%) and methane (1.6%).
Huygens Probe touched down on the surface of Titan in 2005. Interestingly, it detected methane rainfall and dark narrow riverbeds. Images taken by Cassini showed lakes of liquid methane and ethane on Titan.
Saturn’s relatively small moon Enceladus emits jets of ice particles, powdery snow, water vapor and organic compounds. It feeds the E ring.
Atmosphere: Saturn has a thin gaseous atmosphere consisting of mostly hydrogen and helium with cloud layers of ammonia, ammonium hydrosulfide and water-ice, covering the vast ocean of liquid hydrogen underneath.
Size: Saturn’s equatorial radius is 60,268 kilometers. It is also a huge planet, next only to Jupiter. We can fill Saturn with 764 Earths!! See how Earth‘s size compares with that of Saturn in the picture below.
Orbit: Saturn takes 29.4 earth years to orbit the Sun. Its average distance from the Sun is about 1.4 billion kilometers. Sunlight takes 80 minutes to travel from the Sun to Saturn.
Day and Year: Saturn’s day is 10.7 hours. Like Jupiter, it spins extremely fast on its axis. Saturn’s year is 29.4 earth years. (10,756 earth days)
Sources:
- The Cambridge Guide to the Solar System by Kenneth R. Lang, Cambridge University Press.