Saturn is the second biggest planet, and the least dense. It is lighter than water, so in a bathtub big enough it would float.
Its rings stretch about 280,000 km from edge to edge, most of the way from Earth to the Moon. Yet in most places they are only about ten metres thick.
They are made of countless chunks of ice, from grains of sand to pieces the size of a house. And they may not last: Saturn is slowly pulling them in, as a kind of icy rain.
At its north pole sits a storm shaped like a near-perfect hexagon. Each side is wider than Earth.
Saturn has 293 known moons. Titan has lakes of liquid methane and thick orange skies, and Enceladus sprays water out of cracks in its ice into space.
In 2017 the Cassini spacecraft, after 13 years of exploring, was steered into Saturn on purpose so it could never contaminate those moons.
- Width
- 116,464 km
- One day
- 10.7 hours
- One year
- 29.5 Earth years
- Moons
- 293
- Temperature
- −140 °C at the cloud tops
- 70 kg on Earth weighs
- 74 kg here
