Saturn is the ringed planet, a gas giant less dense than water, circled by a vast, paper-thin system of rings made mostly of water ice.
At a glance
| radius | 58,200 km (9.14 × Earth) |
|---|---|
| distance from the Sun | 9.55 AU (1.43 billion km) |
| sunlight takes | 79.5 minutes |
| one orbit | 29.5 years |
| orbit eccentricity | 0.057 |
| reflects | 50% of the sunlight it gets |
Read off the piece’s own catalogue, the same values it draws with.
About Saturn
Like Jupiter, Saturn is mostly hydrogen and helium with no solid surface, but it is so light for its size that it is less dense than water. Its rapid spin flattens it visibly at the poles, and over its north pole the jet streams form a strange, long-lived hexagon. Its pale bands are muted by a high haze.
The rings are the planet’s signature: countless pieces of water ice, from grains to boulders, spread into a disc far wider than the planet yet in most places only tens of metres thick. The Cassini spacecraft orbited Saturn for years, flying through gaps in the rings and past its moons, before it was steered into the planet’s atmosphere at the end of its mission. The age of the rings is still debated.
Saturn has a large family of moons. Titan, with its thick atmosphere, and Enceladus, which sprays water from an ocean under its ice, are among the most closely studied worlds beyond Earth.
What you see in the piece
Saturn is drawn with its real cloud map and its rings, all lit only by reflected sunlight, so the planet throws its shadow across the rings on the side away from the Sun. From another star it cannot be seen at all.
Measured or modelled
How old the rings are is not settled: the Cassini measurements of how clean and light the ice is have been read as a sign of young rings, while other studies argue the rings could be as old as the planet and stay clean over time.
Questions
What are Saturn’s rings made of?
Almost entirely water ice, in pieces ranging from fine grains to boulders, with a little rock and dust.
Would Saturn float in water?
Its average density is lower than water’s, so in that sense yes, though it is a ball of gas and liquid with no surface that could float on anything.