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| "Look at those Rings! They may look solid, but they are really millions of small, tiny rocks and pieces of ice. If you got real close to it, you could even pass through the belt, which is about a mile thick."
Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and is the second amongst other 9 planets with an equatorial diameter of 119,300 kilometers (74,130 miles). Saturn is slightly flattened at the poles, which is a result of the very fast rotation of the planet on its axis. Its day passes just as fast, which is approximately 10.5 hours long, and it takes 29.5 Earth years to revolve about the Sun. Like the other gas giants ó Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune ó it probably consists of a dense, solid core surrounded by an envelope of hydrogen and helium and methane. Saturn is the only planet less dense than water (about 30 percent less). If you can find an ocean huge enough, Saturn would actually float on it like a ball. In Roman mythology, Saturn is the god of agriculture. The associated Greek god, Cronus, was the son of Uranus and Gaia and the father of Zeus (Jupiter). Another fun fact is that Saturn is the root of the English word "Saturday". Saturn has been known since prehistoric times. Galileo was the first to observe it with a telescope in 1610. Early observations of Saturn were complicated by the fact that the Earth passes through the plane of Saturn's rings every few years as Saturn moves in its orbit. A low resolution image of Saturn therefore changes drastically. It was not until 1659 that Christiaan Huygens correctly inferred the geometry of the rings. Saturn's rings remained unique in the known solar system until 1977 when very faint rings were discovered around the other 3 planets, Uranus, Neptune and Jupiter. |
