From the haze-shrouded surface of Titan to crater-riddled Phoebe, each of Saturn's moons tells another piece of the story surrounding the Saturn system. Currently, Saturn has 53 confirmed moons with 29 additional provisional moons awaiting confirmation. Saturn's rings are thought to be pieces of comets, asteroids, or shattered moons that broke up before they reached the planet, torn apart by Saturn's powerful gravity. They are made of billions of small chunks of ice and rock coated with other materials such as dust.
The ring particles mostly range from tiny, dust-sized icy grains to chunks as big as a house. A few particles are as large as mountains. The rings would look mostly white if you looked at them from the cloud tops of Saturn, and interestingly, each ring orbits at a different speed around the planet.
Saturn's ring system extends up to , miles , kilometers from the planet, yet the vertical height is typically about 30 feet 10 meters in the main rings. Named alphabetically in the order they were discovered, the rings are relatively close to each other, with the exception of a gap measuring 2, miles 4, kilometers in width called the Cassini Division that separates Rings A and B. The main rings are A, B, and C. Rings D, E, F, and G are fainter and more recently discovered.
Much farther out, there is the very faint Phoebe ring in the orbit of Saturn's moon Phoebe. Saturn took shape when the rest of the solar system formed about 4.
About 4 billion years ago, Saturn settled into its current position in the outer solar system, where it is the sixth planet from the Sun.
Like Jupiter, Saturn is mostly made of hydrogen and helium, the same two main components that make up the Sun. Like Jupiter, Saturn is made mostly of hydrogen and helium. At Saturn's center is a dense core of metals like iron and nickel surrounded by rocky material and other compounds solidified by intense pressure and heat.
It is enveloped by liquid metallic hydrogen inside a layer of liquid hydrogen —similar to Jupiter's core but considerably smaller. It's hard to imagine, but Saturn is the only planet in our solar system with an average density that is less than water. The giant gas planet could float in a bathtub if such a colossal thing existed.
The planet is mostly swirling gases and liquids deeper down. The extreme pressures and temperatures deep inside the planet would crush, melt, and vaporize any spacecraft trying to fly into the planet. Saturn is blanketed with clouds that appear as faint stripes, jet streams, and storms. The planet is many different shades of yellow, brown, and gray. Winds in the upper atmosphere reach 1, feet per second meters per second in the equatorial region.
In contrast, the strongest hurricane-force winds on Earth top out at about feet per second meters per second. And the pressure — the same kind you feel when you dive deep underwater — is so powerful it squeezes gas into a liquid.
Saturn's north pole has an interesting atmospheric feature — a six-sided jet stream. This hexagon-shaped pattern was first noticed in images from the Voyager I spacecraft and has been more closely observed by the Cassini spacecraft since. Spanning about 20, miles 30, kilometers across, the hexagon is a wavy jet stream of mile-per-hour winds about kilometers per hour with a massive, rotating storm at the center. Hello Professor, One of my fourth grade students Abria posed the question of whether or not Saturn's rings rotate with the planet.
We took a class survey and 12 students believe they probably do and 4 students think they don't. Would you be kind enough to respond to our question? Answer: It sounds like you have had an interesting discussion in class. Well you may be surprised to know that the four students who said the rings didn't orbit with the planet were correct! Let me explain why.
The rings of Saturn are made up of billions upon billions of pieces of rock and dust. They formed around Saturn at the same time that Saturn itself formed some 5 billion years ago. Since they are simply rock and dust, they are not part of the planet itself but simply a vast collection of objects that are orbiting around it like our Moon orbits around the Earth.
Furthermore, they don't all orbit around Saturn at the same speed. Those further away from the Planet travel slower than those nearer. I hope this helps and if you have any more fascinating discussions I'd be more than happy to hear about them.
Is "Saturn" named after the day "Saturday"? How many Saturns can fit inside the Sun? Answer: About Saturns could fit inside the Sun! How Long does it take Saturn to rotate once on its axis? Answer: It takes Saturn just 10 hours and 39 minutes to spin once on its axis. Why does it take that long for Saturn to orbit the sun? Answer: It takes Saturn a lot longer to orbit the Sun compared to the Earth because it is so much further away from the Sun and so has a lot further to travel.
Saturn is named after the Roman god of agriculture and time. How long does light take to reach Saturn from the Sun? Answer: It takes sunlight 1 hour and 20 minutes to reach Saturn. By contrast, it takes just over eight minutes to reach us here on Earth. Saturn moves approximately 22, mph in its revolution around the sun. This is about one-third the speed that Earth travels in its orbit.
Saturn also has much farther to go to complete its annual journey around the sun. The longer axis of its elliptical orbit is almost million miles, about 10 times that of Earth's orbit. Saturn might move slowly in its orbit, but it spins on its axis much more quickly than Earth, completing one rotation in a little less than half an Earth day.
Because Saturn's diameter is nearly 10 time greater than Earth's, any point on Saturn's equator moves nearly 20 times faster than a corresponding point on Earth's equator. This rapid rotation gives Saturn a slightly oblong shape, which flattens at the poles and widens at the equator. When revising estimates of Saturn's rotational rate in , scientists emphasized that it is only an estimate, because the surface isn't solid and has no fixed points.
Perhaps more than any other planet, Saturn represents a world unto itself. It has 62 moons, more than any other planet. Although many of these moons are no more than one or two miles across, others are larger than Earth's moon. The largest, Titan, is the second-largest moon in the solar system; it has an atmosphere. The presence of so many moons, especially the small ones, might explain the distinctive rings around Saturn.
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