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In 1655, Christiaan Huygens was the first person to describe them as a disk surrounding Saturn. [6] The concept that Saturn's rings are made up of a series of tiny ringlets can be traced to Pierre-Simon Laplace, [6] although true gaps are few – it is more correct to think of the rings as an annular disk with concentric local maxima and minima ...
That doesn’t include Saturn’s rings. Saturn is the sixth planet from our sun and orbits at a distance of about 886 million miles from it. Saturn takes about 10.7 hours (no one knows precisely ...
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.
Saturn and its rings are best seen when the planet is at, or near, opposition, the configuration of a planet when it is at an elongation of 180°, and thus appears opposite the Sun in the sky. A Saturnian opposition occurs every year—approximately every 378 days—and results in the planet appearing at its brightest.
Pan is the innermost named moon of Saturn. [4] It is approximately 35 kilometres across and 23 km wide and orbits within the Encke Gap in Saturn's A Ring. Pan is a ring shepherd and is responsible for keeping the Encke Gap free of ring particles. It is sometimes described as having the appearance of a walnut, or raviolo. [5]
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.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — New research suggests that Saturn’s rings may be older than they look — possibly as old as the planet. Instead of being a youthful 400 million years old as commonly thought, the icy, shimmering rings could be around 4.5 billion years old just like Saturn, a Japanese-led team reported Monday.
Fainter planetary rings can form as a result of meteoroid impacts with moons orbiting around the planet or, in the case of Saturn's E-ring, the ejecta of cryovolcanic material. [6] [7] Ring systems may form around centaurs when they are tidally disrupted in a close encounter (within 0.4 to 0.8 times the Roche limit) with a giant planet.