Saturn
Saturn is the second largest planet and sixth from the sun. Saturn is
most known
for its rings, first seen in 1610 by Italian scientist Galileo and
identified as
rings by Dutch astronomer Christian Huygens in 1655. The rings
consist greater
than 100,000 single ringlets. It is the most oblate planet
because of the rapid
rotation of the planet, which flattens Saturn at the
poles by about 10%. Its
composition is mostly composed of hydrogen and
helium. It is mostly liquid, with
a small rocky core expected, but not
directly observe. At the center, heavy
elements have probably settled into
the small rocky core with a temperature
close to 15,000 C (27,000 F). Saturn
also has an international heat source (it
radiates more energy than it
receives). The gravitational pull causes it to emit
three times as much heat
as it receives from the sun. Saturn’s atmosphere is
88% hydrogen and 11%
helium, with traces of other gasses. The body of Saturn
rotates with a period
of 10 hours 39 minutes 25 seconds. The ring system of
Saturn is divided
into 5 major components: the G, F, A, B, and C rings, listed
from the outside
to inside (but in reality, these major divisions are subdivided
into
thousands of individual ringlets). The F and G rings are thin and
difficult
to see, while the A, B, and C rings are broad and easily visible.
The large gap
between the A ring and the B ring is called the Cassaini
division. The visible
rings of Saturn stretch out to a distance of 136,200-km
(84,650 miles) from
Saturn’s center, but in many regions they may be only
5 meters thick. They
contain rocks, frozen gases, and water ice in lumps. One
of the rings is even
dense enough to block sunlight. Saturn’s current number
of known satellites is
19. These range in size from Titan, the second
largest moon in the Solar System,
to small asteroid like objects. The moons
are Atlas, Calypso, Dione, Enceladus,
Epimetheus, Helene, Hyperion,
Iapetus, Janus, Mimas, Pan, Pandora, Phoebe,
Prometheus, Rhea, Telesto,
Tethys, and Titan. There are extemely high velocity
winds in the atmosphere
of Saturn have been measured to be as high as 1800
km/hr.