Facts about Saturn
posted in Amazing Facts, Latest News |
According to the Roman mythology, Saturn is the god of agriculture. The related Greek god, Cronus, was the son of Uranus and Gaia and the father of Zeus (Jupiter). Saturn is the basis of the English word “Saturday”.
Saturn has been well-known since primitive times. The first person to observe it with a telescope was Galileo; he noted its anomalous form but was puzzled by it. Early annotations of Saturn were convoluted by the fact that the Earth passes through the plane of Saturn’s rings every few years as Saturn moves in its orbit.
A low resolution image of Saturn therefore changes considerably. It was not until 1659 that Christiaan Huygens rightly inferred the geometry of the rings. Saturn’s rings remained unique in the known solar system until 1977 when very faint rings were discovered around Uranus (and shortly thereafter around Jupiter and Neptune).
• In the solar system Saturn has the most number of moons, including Titan, a moon with an ambiance possibly similar to Earth’s billions of years ago.
• Saturn is a faintly smaller version of Jupiter, with alike, but less idiosyncratic, surface patterns.
• The main difference between Saturn and Jupiter is its amazing rings.
• Saturn’s rings are believed to be the particles of an old moon destroyed in a collision about 50 million years ago.
• It is assumed that Saturn’s rings will vanish one day. They will either dissolve into space or get sucked into the planet by its pull of gravity.
• Saturn is twice as far away from the Sun as Jupiter is.
• Saturn is the second biggest planet in the Solar System after Jupiter. It is so huge that Earth could fit into it 755 times.
• A year on Saturn would take almost thirty Earth years.