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Saturn imaged in 2021 through a 6" telescope, dimly showing the polar hexagon. Saturn's polar hexagon was discovered by David Godfrey in 1987 [14] from piecing together fly-by views from the 1981 Voyager mission, [15] [16] and was revisited in 2006 by the Cassini mission.
Saturn's rings require at least a 15-mm-diameter telescope [151] to resolve and thus were not known to exist until Christiaan Huygens saw them in 1655 and published his observations in 1659. Galileo , with his primitive telescope in 1610, [ 152 ] [ 153 ] incorrectly thought of Saturn's appearing not quite round as two moons on Saturn's sides.
The planet Earth has a rather slight equatorial bulge; its equatorial diameter is about 43 km (27 mi) greater than its polar diameter, with a difference of about 1 ⁄ 298 of the equatorial diameter. If Earth were scaled down to a globe with an equatorial diameter of 1 metre (3.3 ft), that difference would be only 3 mm (0.12 in).
The size of solid bodies does not include an object's atmosphere. For example, Titan looks bigger than Ganymede, but its solid body is smaller. For the giant planets , the "radius" is defined as the distance from the center at which the atmosphere reaches 1 bar of atmospheric pressure.
Saturn – sixth planet from the Sun and the second-largest in the Solar System, after Jupiter. It is a gas giant with an average radius about nine times that of Earth . [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Although only one-eighth the average density of Earth, with its larger volume Saturn is just over 95 times more massive.
If A = 2a is the equatorial diameter, and C = 2c is the polar diameter, ... Saturn is the most oblate planet in the Solar System, with a flattening of 0.09796. [5]
Solar radius is a unit of distance used to express the size of stars in astronomy relative to the Sun. ... Saturn: 0.0866 60,268 [18] Uranus: 0.03673 25,559 [18 ...
Phoebe (/ ˈ f iː b i / FEE-bee) is the most massive irregular satellite of Saturn with a mean diameter of 213 km (132 mi). It was discovered by William Henry Pickering on 18 March 1899 [9] from photographic plates that had been taken by DeLisle Stewart starting on 16 August 1898 at the Boyden Station of the Carmen Alto Observatory near Arequipa, Peru.