The Gas Giants: Saturn

Saturn is the 6th planet from the sun and is the only planet that has rings which are visible from Earth (the other 3 gas giants also have rings, but are extremely thin and unvisible from Earth).

Saturn has been known since prehistoric time, but it was first observed by Galileo in 1610. When he first saw the rings, he wasn't sure what he was looking at. He, in fact, thought there were three planets there. At a later date, he looks at it and didn't see the rings at all this time, so he dismissed at as an illusion. The fact is at times, the rings horizontal to our point of view and thus become invisable. Galileo just didn't have the knowledge to compute what he was looking at. Christiann Huygens was the first to correctly identify them as rings in 1959 and solved the problem.

The first close up look we got of Saturn was from the Pioneer 11 probe in 1979. It was then when we got a good close up look at Saturn and the rings. Voyager I and Voyager II followed behind. Our next visit will be the Cassini probe in 2004.

The rings, once thought to only be 3, are actually hundreds, maybe thousands, of tiny rings one after another made up mostly of tiny particales. The rings orbit around Saturn within an area where tidal forces caused by Saturn's strong gravity. Most small objects that fall into the Saturn's tidal forces would crumble and becomes ring material. That is most likely how the rings formed.

Saturn's atmosphere is much like Jupiter, at about 75% hydrogen and 25% helium with trances of other molecues. Saturn's clouds are much less noticable than Jupiters. However, the swrils, bands and storms that appear on Jupitar also appear on Saturn. Most notibly, the Hubble Space Telescope has observed a large storm near Saturn's equation that was not there during the Voyager visits. Could Saturn develope a great storm to rage on for thousands of years like Jupiter?

Saturn does have very large blizzards. Perhaps the largest in the solar system. Everytime Saturn reaches its closest position to the sun, the extra heat from the sun causes the warmed air at the top of the atmosphere to interact with the colder air underneath causing enormous blizzards ammonia to rage. The jetsream of Saturn catches the ammonia 'snow' and sprays it across the atmosphere over a distance that is several times larger than the Earth.

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