Those times when you can’t see Saturn’s rings… 𝐇𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐲 𝐒𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐲! […]

Those times when you can’t see Saturn’s rings… 𝐇𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐲 𝐒𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐲! 🪐

Rings? Is wafer thin. Actually, much thinner. Saturn’s rings are 99.9% ice and extend out 80k km, more than doubling the radius of the planet, but it’s hard to conceptualize how thin they are. If you made a scale model of Saturn’s rings using paper, the page would be 1.7 miles across!

Saturn is a gem of the skies, 95x as massive as Earth, but has a similar gravitational constant because of its low density (Saturn would float on water). It swirls with supersonic winds and hosts 82 moons outside of its rings, the largest of which, Titan (in the foreground here), is bigger than Mercury and the only moon with a thick atmosphere.

In a debatable discovery by Cassini, the rings are very new relative to the age of Saturn, only 10-100M years old, and they will be gone again within 300M years. The total mass of Saturn’s rings is half the Earth’s Antarctic ice shelf, and both are disappearing, so enjoy them while you can.