I guess he liked it, because he put multiple rings on it.
Everyone loves Saturn because of its beautiful, shiny rings, but there are a lot more and cooler things to love about Saturn. (Let’s make this fun: take a shot every time I say “Saturn”!)
The Basics
Saturn was named after the Roman god of agriculture. About every 27 Earth years, Saturnians celebrate a birthday. Saturn has multiple rings. They were discovered by Galileo in the 17th century. Some of them are invisible (more on that later).
Saturn is about 1,426,725,400 km away from the sun, which is why its normal temperature is -178C.
Saturn’s mass, which is 95 times that of Earth, is 568,510,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg.
The equatorial radius of Saturn is 235,298 miles, and its volume is about 800 times the Earth’s.
The Planet
Saturn’s Its upper atmosphere is composed almost completely of hydrogen and helium (tangent: we’re about to run out of helium on Earth!). There’s also gaseous ammonia and ice clouds that create lightning storms! In fact, it was the space probe Cassini that recorded the first account of a lightning storm on another planet in 2009 (http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/index.cfm?id=901). On very particular times of very particular years, Saturn’s tilt allows the sun to reflect off the shiny rings and light up the whole planet for us to see.
The Rings
Saturn’s rings are made up of chunks of ice – from the size of a crumb to the size of a house. It’s gravity that keeps them in line, but scientists don’t know how long they’ll last. One hypothesis is that the chunks are remnants of moons – moons made of mostly ice and some rock – that shattered under the force of Saturn’s gravitational pull. One day, there won’t be any rings. Scientific American says we’re incredibly lucky to be able to witness the relatively short life of the magnificent rings – and that they may only have several millions years left.
Then there are Saturn’s invisible rings (http://discovermagazine.com/2010/jul-aug/06-saturn.s-giant-storms-hidden-rings-bizarre-moons/?searchterm=saturn). There is the “Cassini Division,” named after the satellite Cassini that looks like a huge gap between ring A and ring B. While it may look like an invisible ring, there are actually particles floating in it. Scientists think that the gap is caused by the gravitational pull of the massive B ring.
The Moons
Saturn has 62 moons, 53 of which are actually named. Its largest moon is Titan, which is bigger than Mercury but not as big as Mars. It’s also surprisingly similar to what scientists believe was early Earth. In 2005 the probe Huygens probe sent to Earth a myriad of exciting things about Titan. A nitrogen-rich atmosphere is one of its biggest similarities with Earth, and makes Titan the only moon with an atmosphere. There’s sand, liquid methane-lakes , snow, fog, and even volcanic activity.
Although the differences are many –frigid temperatures, a huge concentration of methane in the atmosphere, and the snow is made of methane, not water – scientists speculate that Titan could be a window into our own planet’s past.
A second probe, Cassini, has further expanded our knowledge of Titan – we now know that it is one of four moons in our solar system whose crust is a huge, thick sheet of ice, under which resides an ocean.
Then there’s Enceladus, which has geysers. Cassini detected these geysers in 2005, which lead scientists to believe that Enceladus may also have a liquid ocean underneath its icy crust. Cassini also reported the presence of salt in Saturn’s outermost ring, E. Since astronomers believe that the geysers are feeding the E ring, the presence of salt in the ring could be more evidence of an ocean.
Saturn: a ringed beauty
Daily Emerald
January 25, 2011
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