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Saturn is named after the Roman god of wealth and agriculture, who was the father of the god Jupiter.Its astronomical symbol has been traced back to the Greek Oxyrhynchus Papyri, where it can be seen to be a Greek kappa-rho ligature with a horizontal stroke, as an abbreviation for Κρονος (), the Greek name for the planet (). [35]
The adjectival forms of the names of astronomical bodies are not always easily predictable. Attested adjectival forms of the larger bodies are listed below, along with the two small Martian moons; in some cases they are accompanied by their demonymic equivalents, which denote hypothetical inhabitants of these bodies.
The full set of rings, imaged on 19 July 2013 as Saturn eclipses the Sun from the vantage of the Cassini orbiter, 1.2 million kilometres (3 ⁄ 4 million miles) distant. Earth appears as a dot at 4 o'clock, between the G and E rings – with its brightness artificially exaggerated in this photograph.
Mimas, also designated Saturn I, is the seventh-largest natural satellite of Saturn.With a mean diameter of 396.4 kilometres or 246.3 miles, Mimas is the smallest astronomical body known to be roughly rounded in shape due to its own gravity.
According to the IAU's explicit count, there are eight planets in the Solar System; four terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) and four giant planets, which can be divided further into two gas giants (Jupiter and Saturn) and two ice giants (Uranus and Neptune). When excluding the Sun, the four giant planets account for more than ...
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.
The moon was named in 2006 after Daphnis, a shepherd, pipes player, and pastoral poet in Greek mythology; [8] he was descendant of the Titans, after whom the largest moons of Saturn are named. Both Daphnis and Pan, the only other known shepherd moon to orbit within Saturn's main rings, are named for mythological figures associated with shepherds.
Aegaeon is the smallest known moon of Saturn outside of the rings and has an extremely elongated shape, measuring 1.4 km × 0.5 km × 0.4 km (0.87 mi × 0.31 mi × 0.25 mi) in size. [9] Measurements of its mass show that Aegaeon has a very low density, likely due to a highly porous and icy interior structure. [ 5 ]