Amazing Astronomy

Saturn

               Mass                          :    568.3E24 kg

               Volume                       :    8.2713×10¹⁴ km³

                   Gravity                       :    10.44 m/s²

              Distance from Sun       :   1,433,000,000 km

              Orbital period             :    29 years

              Length of day              :   0d 10h 39m

               


                                                    In Roman mythology, Saturn is the god of agriculture. The associated Greek god, Cronus, was the son of Uranus and Gaia and the father of Zeus (Jupiter). Saturn is the root of the English word "Saturday" . Saturn has been known since prehistoric times. Galileo was the first to observe it with a telescope in 1610; he noted its odd appearance but was confused by it. Early observations of Saturn were complicated by the fact that the Earth passes through the plane of Saturn's rings every few years as Saturn moves in its orbit. A low resolution image of Saturn therefore changes drastically. It was not until 1659 that Christiaan Huygens correctly inferred the geometry of the rings. Saturn's rings remained unique in the known solar system until 1977 when very faint rings were discovered around Uranus (and shortly thereafter around Jupiter and Neptune).
                                                    Saturn is a gas giant made up mostly of hydrogen and helium. Saturn is the second largest planet, big enough to hold more than 760 Earths, and is more massive than any other planet except  Jupiter, roughly 95 times Earth's mass. However, Saturn has the lowest density of all the planets, and is the only one less dense than water — if there were a bathtub big enough to hold it, Saturn would float on top.
                                                  Saturn is the farthest planet from Earth visible to the naked human eye. The yellow and gold bands seen in the planet's atmosphere are the result of super-fast winds in the upper atmosphere, which can reach up to 1,100 miles per hour (1,800 kilometers per hour) around its equator, combined with heat rising from the planet's interior.Saturn spins faster than any other planet except Jupiter, completing a rotation roughly every 10-and-a-half hours. This rapid spinning causes Saturn to bulge at its equator and flatten at its poles — the planet is 8,000 miles (13,000 kilometers) wider at its equator than
between the poles.Saturn occasionally has storms on its surface, similar to those of Jupiter. The Great White Spot is a massive storm in the planet's northern hemisphere that has been observed about once every Saturnian year since 1876. 


Chemical composition :
                                              Saturn seems to have a hot solid inner core of iron and rocky material surrounded by an outer core probably composed of ammonia, methane, and water. Next is a layer of highly compressed, liquid metallic hydrogen, followed by a region of viscous hydrogen and helium. This hydrogen and helium becomes gaseous near the planet's surface and merges with its atmosphere.

 Saturn's Moons :
                                 
                                             Saturn has at least 62 moons. Since the planet was named after Cronus, lord of the titans in Greek mythology, most of Saturn's moons are named after other titans, their descendants, as well as after giants from Gallic, Inuit and Norse myths.
                                             Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is slightly larger than Mercury, and is the second-largest moon in the solar system behind Jupiter's moon Ganymede. Titan is veiled under a very thick, nitrogen-rich atmosphere that might be like what Earth's was long ago, before life. While the Earth's atmosphere extends only about 37 miles (60 kilometers) into space, Titan's reaches nearly 10 times as far.

Saturn's Rings : 
                                           Galileo was the first to see Saturn's rings in 1610, although from his telescope they resembled handles or arms. It took Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, who had a more powerful telescope, to propose that Saturn had a thin, flat ring.
                                           Saturn actually has many rings made of billions of particles of ice and rock, ranging in size from a grain of sugar to the size of a house. The rings are believe to be debris left over from comets, asteroids or shattered moons. Although they extend thousands of miles from the planet, the main rings are typically only about 30 feet thick. Cassini revealed vertical formations in some of the rings, with particles piling up in bumps and ridges more than 2 miles (3 kilometers) high.
                                          The rings are generally named alphabetically in the order they were discovered. They are usually relatively close to each other, with one key exception caused by the Cassini Division, a gap some 2,920 miles (4,700 kilometers) wide. The main rings, working out from the planet, are known as C, B and A, with the Cassini Division separating B and A. The innermost is the extremely faint D ring, while the outermost to date, revealed in 2009, could fit a billion Earths within it.

 Magnetic Field :