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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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
A study published in the journal Science suggests a hypothetical moon (called Chrysalis) came too close to Saturn's gravitational pull and was torn apart, forming the planet's iconic rings.