Top 5 Interesting Facts About Saturn: Hello, Everyone Today I am going to share some interesting facts on The Top Five interesting facts about the Saturn. The Saturn is sometimes called “The Jewel of the Solar System.” It is a planet that is nothing like our own. The Humans have been gazing up at the planet of Saturn for a long time. They have been wondering about it for the thousands of years. Here are The Top Five interesting facts about the planet Saturn.
Top 5 Interesting Facts About Saturn
Table of Contents
1. Saturn Is Probably Best Known for Its Planetary Rings
The Saturn facts reveal that the planet is the best known to most for its system of the planetary rings, although it is not the only planet in the solar system with the rings – the other planets such as Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune also have them.
But the Saturn’s rings are far more spectacular than the rings of the other planets. First of all, they are much brighter and more distinct than the rings of the any other planets, and can be seen from the Earth with even the most basic of the telescopes. Second, they are quite large and extend from the distance of 6,600 km to almost 121,000 km above the equator of the planet, but are at the same time also amazingly thin for their size – as their thickness is close to the length of a football field. For some time, they were believed to have been formed in the age of the dinosaurs, but the Cassini-Huygens probe, which has been orbiting the planet and its moons since the year 2014, revealed that the planet Saturn might have had its rings throughout its history.
2. Saturn’s Brown-Yellow Color is the Result of Its Upper Cloud Layers
The color of a planet is a consequence of the things where it is made of and the way its surface or the atmosphere reflects and also it absorbs sunlight. The planet Saturn facts show that its yellow-brown color comes from its upper cloud layer, which is mostly consists of the ammonia crystals. Since the planet Saturn can be seen from the Earth even with the naked eye, anybody can observe its dull yellow color, with the occasional hints of the orange, in the detail with a small telescope. Those observers who are fortunate enough to have access to a bigger telescope, such as the Hubble, are able to see the Saturn’s subtle cloud layers in the form of the swirling storms that mix with orange and white.
Some images have taken by the Cassini-Huygens space probe which caused quite a stir as they showed the planet to be blue in the color, but this was later explained by a special scattering of the light from the space probe’s perspective.
3. Saturn Is a Pretty Cool Planet – Literally!
Although, the planet Saturn has a very hot core, Saturn facts show that the planet is the actually pretty cool – not very surprising, since the planet is nearly the distance of 900,000 miles from the Sun (approximately 10 times farther than the Earth). The high temperature of the core decreases as quickly as the distance from the core increases; in the lower layers of the atmosphere, the temperature is around the 80° F (27° C), and in the upper levels the temperature is around -225° F (-140° C).
The average surface temperature on the Saturn is around -300° F (- 184° C), but it is varies greatly depending on the exact location. The planet Saturn has a warm polar vortex on its south pole (the only planet in the Solar System to be exhibit such a phenomenon!), which is the warmest part of its surface with the temperatures around -188° F (-122° C). For the comparison: the coldest temperature ever observed on the Earth is -129° F (-89° C).
4. Saturn Weighs about the Same as 100 Earths
The mass of the planet Saturn is 5.7 x 1026 kg, which is equals to the approximately 95 Earths. According to its size, we would expect the Saturn to have a much larger mass, but since the Saturn is the only planet in the solar system with a lower density than the water (it would actually float in the water), 1 cubic centimeter of the planet on average weights less than the 0.7 grams. For the comparison: 1 cubic centimeter of the Earth has a mass of 5.5 grams on the average.
Saturn’s surface gravity is the only slightly bigger than the Earth’s at 10.44 m/s². This means that a 200-lb.A man would feel a weight gain of 13 lb. when on the Saturn. To complicate the things further, this would only be the true on the surface near the poles. The strong centrifugal force of the planet, which is caused by its rapid spinning, and it affects the gravity near the equator by decreasing it to only about 91% of the gravity on the Earth. This means that a 200-lb.A man on the equator of the planet Saturn would weigh only 182 lb.
5. We May Be Able to Learn More About Saturn in the Near Future
The planet Saturn and some of its moons, especially the Titan and Enceladus, are the potential targets of the future human exploration and it is possibly even colonization due to their mining potential and its possible ability to sustain the human life. Thus, it is no surprise that the scientific research of the Saturn system in the following decades won’t be stop.At the moment, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft which is still exploring the planet Saturn system and it is expected to do so at least until the year of 2017 when the lifespan of the probe is to be expected to end.
An in-depth the future mission to the Saturn, which is named the Titan Saturn System Mission (TSSM), is planned to launch sometime in the years of 2020s. According to the initial NASA and the ESA (European Space Agency) plans, the mission was supposed to start in the year of 2020, but was later postponed in the favor of an exploration mission to the Jupiter.
So, these are The Top Five interesting facts about the planet Saturn. If any Queries or Questions is persist then please feel free to comment your view points