What Is The Ring We Can See Around Saturn?

First observed by Galileo in 1610, Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun, and the second largest.

Saturn is easily distinguishable from the other planets because of its distinctive ring, which is actually made up of a number of rings. There are two prominent rings, known as A and B, and one fainter ring, known as C.

The rings are actually composed of numerous small particles, each of which is in independent orbit around Saturn. These particles range in width from a centimetre to several metres.

These particles seem to be composed primarily of water in the form of ice, and may also include some rocky particles.

There is a fairly large gap between the A ring and the B ring, and this has become known as the Cassini division.

More recently D, E, F and G rings have been discovered, but these are even fainter than the C ring.

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In 1610, Galileo, the man who first explored the heavens with a telescope, first noticed something strange about Saturn it seemed to have things sticking out of its sides!

In 1655, a man called Christian Huygens studied Saturn with a better telescope, and he saw something so strange he was afraid to tell anyone about it! So he set down his observations in a code, which, when translated, says: "It is girdled by a thin flat ring, nowhere touching, inclined to the ecliptic".

The rings of the planet Saturn, so startling to the first men who noticed them, still remain one of the great mysteries of our solar system. In fact, as far as is known, such rings exist nowhere else in the heavens.

Of course, aside from the rings, we do know certain things about the planet Saturn. It takes 29-1/2years to go around the sun, it is second in size to Jupiter, and it has nine satellites that revolve around it. It has an atmosphere around it that we cannot penetrate, but what we do see is not solid matter. There may be some rocky metallic material at the core of the planet.

And it has those mysterious rings. There arc three main rings all on the same plane (like three rings you might make on a flat dish), and they lie in the plane of Saturn's equator. The rings extend outward for about 170,000 miles.

The middle ring is the brightest. It is separated from the outer ring by a gap about 1,800 miles wide. The inner ring is very dim. Other faint outer rings have been detected by spacecraft and one may even extend from the inside ring almost down to the cloud tops of the planet. The rings are not solid, but are composed of pieces of ice-coated rubble orbiting the planet like tiny "moonlets". They may be fragments of a moon which has never been formed.

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