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Titans obliquity at 26.7° is high enough to cause seasonal variations within the stratospheric spin. [4] Attempts to model super-rotation on the gas giants, including Titan, has been abundant. The first observations of Titan in the 1980's revealed little information about circulation within the atmosphere due to the low contrast photochemical ...
Saturn's equinoxes, when the Sun passes through the ring plane, are not evenly spaced. The sun passes south to north through the ring plane when Saturn's heliocentric longitude is 173.6 degrees (e.g. 11 August 2009), about the time Saturn crosses from Leo to Virgo. 15.7 years later Saturn's longitude reaches 353.6 degrees and the sun passes to ...
In astronomy, the rotation period or spin period [1] of a celestial object (e.g., star, planet, moon, asteroid) has two definitions. The first one corresponds to the sidereal rotation period (or sidereal day ), i.e., the time that the object takes to complete a full rotation around its axis relative to the background stars ( inertial space ).
NASA's Cassini spacecraft sent back images looking over the shoulder of Saturn's rings. See more on Saturn's rings: No telescope on this planet would ever have been able to see this.
Saturn is named after the Roman god of wealth and agriculture, who was the father of the god Jupiter.Its astronomical symbol has been traced back to the Greek Oxyrhynchus Papyri, where it can be seen to be a Greek kappa-rho ligature with a horizontal stroke, as an abbreviation for Κρονος (), the Greek name for the planet (). [35]
Saturn’s autumnal equinox is expected to occur on May 6, 2025. Spying Saturn’s spokes The NASA Voyager 2 spacecraft captured the first evidence of the spokes in the 1980s.
There is a near-resonance between the precession of Saturn's rotational axis and that of Neptune's orbital axis (both of which have periods of about 1.87 million years), which has been identified as the likely source of Saturn's large axial tilt (26.7°). [18] [19] [20] Initially, Saturn probably had a tilt closer to that of Jupiter (3.1 ...
Venus probably began with a fast prograde rotation with a period of several hours much like most of the planets in the Solar System. Venus is close enough to the Sun to experience significant gravitational tidal dissipation , and also has a thick enough atmosphere to create thermally driven atmospheric tides that create a retrograde torque .