Planets · Gas giant
Saturn
1.4 billion km from the Sun · Light crosses it in 0.39 seconds
- Across
- 116,464 km
- Vs Earth
- 0.83× Jupiter
- Mass
- 95 Earths
About
Saturn's rings are only tens of metres thick but stretch hundreds of thousands of kilometres — countless chunks of nearly pure water ice, from grains to house-sized boulders, each on its own orbit. The planet itself is a gas giant so light it would float in water.
So light for its size it would float in a big enough bathtub.
At a glance
| Year | 29.4 years |
|---|---|
| Day | 10 hours 33 minutes |
| Density | 0.69 g/cm³ — less than water |
| Moons | 274 confirmed |
Did you know
- The rings are young by cosmic standards, perhaps only 100 million years old, and are slowly raining down onto the planet.
- A hexagonal jet stream, 30,000 km across, circles its north pole — nobody expected a six-sided storm.
- Cassini orbited Saturn for 13 years and ended by diving into the planet in 2017 to avoid contaminating its moons.
Real photos
- Saturn in infrared from Webb and in visible light from Hubble, 2024 — NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, A. Simon (NASA-GSFC), M. Wong (University of California); Image Processing: J. DePasquale (STScI) (CC BY 4.0) · source
- The Day the Earth Smiled: Saturn backlit by the Sun, with Earth a dot below the rings, Cassini 2013 — NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute · source
- Saturn from Cassini, four years into its mission — NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute · source