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The rings of Saturn are the most extensive and complex ring system of any planet in the Solar System. They consist of countless small particles, ranging in size from micrometers to meters, [1] that orbit around Saturn. The ring particles are made almost entirely of water ice, with a trace component of rocky material.
Saturn's hexagon. A partial view of Saturn's north pole, 2016. Saturn's hexagon is a persistent approximately hexagonal cloud pattern around the north pole of the planet Saturn, located at about 78°N. [1][2][3] The sides of the hexagon are about 14,500 km (9,000 mi) long, [4][5][6][7] which is about 2,000 km (1,200 mi) longer than the diameter ...
Saturn's atmosphere exhibits a banded pattern similar to Jupiter's, but Saturn's bands are much fainter and are much wider near the equator. The nomenclature used to describe these bands is the same as on Jupiter. Saturn's finer cloud patterns were not observed until the flybys of the Voyager spacecraft during the 1980s.
It is estimated that the A Ring contains 7,000–8,000 propellers larger than 0.8 km in size and millions larger than 0.25 km. [4] In April 2014, NASA scientists reported the possible consolidation of a new moon within the A Ring, implying that Saturn's present moons may have formed in a similar process in the past when Saturn's ring system was ...
He discovered Saturn's biggest moon, Titan, and was the first to explain Saturn's strange appearance as due to "a thin, flat ring, nowhere touching, and inclined to the ecliptic." [10] In 1662 Huygens developed what is now called the Huygenian eyepiece, a telescope with two lenses to diminish the amount of dispersion. [11]
Plumes from the moon Enceladus, which seems similar in chemical makeup to comets, [12] have been shown to be the source of the material in the E Ring. [13] The E Ring is the widest and outermost ring of Saturn (except for the tenuous Phoebe ring). It is an extremely wide but diffuse disk of microscopic icy or dusty material.
September 18, 2024 at 1:43 AM. Earth may briefly have had a ring system similar to Saturn ’s over 450 million years ago during a period of unusually intense meteorite bombardment, a new study ...
The Day the Earth Smiled. Earth can be seen as a blue dot underneath the rings of Saturn. The photomosaic from NASA's "Wave at Saturn" campaign. The collage includes some 1,600 photos taken by members of the public on The Day the Earth Smiled. The Day the Earth Smiled is a composite photograph taken by the NASA spacecraft Cassini on July 19, 2013.