News tagged with saturn
Largest Ring Around Saturn Discovered
(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered an enormous ring around Saturn -- by far the largest of the giant planet's many rings.
Oct 07, 2009 |
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Falcon Heavy Rocket gets unveiled by SpaceX (Update)
(PhysOrg.com) -- Private spaceflight company, SpaceX, unveiled their massive 22 story big Falcon Heavy rocket capable of carrying a cargo capacity of 117,000 pounds. The 27-enginge Falcon Heavy is aimed to ...
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Apr 05, 2011 |
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Exotic life beyond Earth? Looking for life as we don't know it
Scientists at a new interdisciplinary research institute in Austria are working to uncover how life might evolve with "exotic" biochemistry and solvents, such as sulphuric acid instead of water. Their research ...
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Sep 18, 2009 |
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Saturn's Mysterious Hexagon Emerges from Winter Darkness
(PhysOrg.com) -- After waiting years for the sun to illuminate Saturn's north pole again, cameras aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft have captured the most detailed images yet of the intriguing hexagon shape ...
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Dec 09, 2009 |
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A water ocean on Titan?
Oddities in the rotation of Saturn's largest moon Titan might add to growing evidence that it harbors an underground ocean, researchers suggest.
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
May 05, 2011 |
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Cassini finds oxygen-carbon dioxide atmosphere on Saturn's moon Rhea
(PhysOrg.com) -- In a flyby past Rhea, Saturn's second-largest moon, NASA's spacecraft Cassini has revealed the presence of a thin atmosphere of 70 percent oxygen and 30 percent carbon dioxide, which is apparently ...
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Nov 26, 2010 |
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Strongest evidence yet indicates Enceladus hiding saltwater ocean
(PhysOrg.com) -- Samples of icy spray shooting from Saturn's moon Enceladus collected during Cassini spacecraft flybys show the strongest evidence yet for the existence of a large-scale, subterranean saltwater ...
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Jun 22, 2011 |
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What caused a giant arrow-shaped cloud on Saturn's moon Titan?
(PhysOrg.com) -- Why does Titan, Saturn's largest moon, have what looks like an enormous white arrow about the size of Texas on its surface?
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Aug 16, 2011 |
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Avoid swimming in interplanetary lakes: Research confirms oily 'water' on Saturn's moon
Titan, one of Saturn's moons, is the only moon in the solar system with an atmosphere -- ten times denser than the atmosphere of Earth. Five years ago, the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn, a collaboration ...
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Sep 21, 2010 |
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A new theory to explain superrotation on Venus
(PhysOrg.com) -- One of the mysteries in our Solar System is superrotation, a phenomenon known since the late 1960s, in which the winds on Venus blow faster than the planet rotates. Scientists have proposed ...
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
May 31, 2010 |
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Voyager instrument cooling after heater turned off
(PhysOrg.com) -- In order to reduce power consumption, mission managers have turned off a heater on part of NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, dropping the temperature of its ultraviolet spectrometer instrument ...
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Jan 18, 2012 |
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Computer simulation shows Solar System once had an extra planet
(PhysOrg.com) -- A new study published on arXiv.org shows that, based on computer simulations, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune may not have been the only gas giants in our solar system. According to David ...
Sep 22, 2011 |
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Cassini successfully flies over Enceladus
These raw, unprocessed images of Saturn's moons Enceladus and Tethys were taken on April 14, 2012, by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Apr 17, 2012 |
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Icy moons of Saturn and Jupiter may have conditions needed for life
(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists once thought that life could originate only within a solar system's "habitable zone," where a planet would be neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on its surface. ...
Dec 15, 2009 |
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50 new exoplanets discovered by HARPS
Astronomers using ESO's world-leading exoplanet hunter HARPS have today announced a rich haul of more than 50 new exoplanets, including 16 super-Earths, one of which orbits at the edge of the habitable zone ...
Sep 12, 2011 |
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Saturn
Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second largest planet in the Solar System, after Jupiter. Saturn, along with Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, is classified as a gas giant. Together, these four planets are sometimes referred to as the Jovian, meaning "Jupiter-like", planets.
Saturn is named after the Roman god Saturn (that became the namesake of Saturday), equated to the Greek Kronos (the Titan father of Zeus) the Babylonian Ninurta and to the Hindu Shani. Saturn's symbol represents the god's sickle (Unicode: ♄).
The planet Saturn is composed of hydrogen, with small proportions of helium and trace elements. The interior consists of a small core of rock and ice, surrounded by a thick layer of metallic hydrogen and a gaseous outer layer. The outer atmosphere is generally bland in appearance, although long-lived features can appear. Wind speeds on Saturn can reach 1,800 km/h, significantly faster than those on Jupiter. Saturn has a planetary magnetic field intermediate in strength between that of Earth and the more powerful field around Jupiter.
Saturn has a prominent system of rings, consisting mostly of ice particles with a smaller amount of rocky debris and dust. Sixty-one known moons orbit the planet, not counting hundreds of "moonlets" within the rings. Titan, Saturn's largest and the Solar System's second largest moon (after Jupiter's Ganymede), is larger than the planet Mercury and is the only moon in the Solar System to possess a significant atmosphere.
For more information about Saturn, read the full article at
Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
