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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 the south side of the ring plane.
The scientists surmise Saturn’s rings may be pristine not because they are young but because they are dirt-resistant. Saturn's rings are long thought to be between 100 million and 400 million years old based on more than a decade of observations by NASA's Cassini spacecraft before its demise in 2017.
J1407b's disk has a 4-million km (2.5-million mi)-wide gap between radii 0.396 to 0.421 AU (59.2 to 63.0 million km; 36.8 to 39.1 million mi), which is believed to have been created by a nearly-Earth-sized (<0.8 M 🜨) exomoon orbiting within that gap and clearing out material, in a similar fashion to the shepherd moons of Saturn's rings.
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 has the most spectacular ring system, with seven rings and several gaps and divisions between them. Few missions have visited Saturn: Pioneer 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2 flew by, but Cassini ...
Saturn’s rings are seen as viewed by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which obtained the images that comprise this mosaic at a distance of approximately 450,000 miles from Saturn April 25, 2007.
See more on Saturn's rings: No telescope on this planet would ever have been able to see this. Cassini left Earth in 1997 and, in its nearly two decades of exploration, has sent home remarkable ...
A ring system is a disc or torus orbiting an astronomical object that is composed of solid material such as gas, dust, meteoroids, planetoids or moonlets and stellar objects. Ring systems are best known as planetary rings, common components of satellite systems around giant planets such as of Saturn, or circumplanetary disks.