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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]
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.
Pioneer 11 image of Saturn.. Saturn was first visited by Pioneer 11 in September 1979. It flew within 20,000 kilometres (12,000 mi) of the top of the planet's cloud layer. Low-resolution images were acquired of the planet and a few of its moons; the resolution of the images was not good enough to discern surface featu
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.
However, one planet stands out from the rest, at least in appearance, having an elaborate system of breathtaking rings: Saturn. August is the best time in 2022 to view the ringed planet in the ...
The Great White Spot, also known as Great White Oval (named by analogy to Jupiter's Great Red Spot) is a series of periodic storms on the planet Saturn that are large enough to be visible from Earth by telescope by their characteristic white appearance. The spots can be several thousands of kilometers wide.
The magnetosphere of Saturn is the cavity created in the flow of the solar wind by the planet's internally generated magnetic field. Discovered in 1979 by the Pioneer 11 spacecraft, Saturn's magnetosphere is the second largest of any planet in the Solar System after Jupiter .
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.