# Saturn <!-- SOLSIM:BEGIN g31 — Solar System explorer state (hand-built on wt-core, specs/solar/); do not hand-edit inside --> **Microsim — three.js (Wikitube framework):** *Saturn in the Solar System explorer* <div class="wt-sim" data-src="https://wikitube-3d-microsims.netlify.app/solar/Solar_System.html?obj=Saturn&embed=1" data-title="Saturn in the Solar System explorer"></div> *The Solar System explorer locked on this article's state (`?obj=Saturn`); every object and population of the [[PORTAL_Solar_System|Solar System portal]] has its own state in the same scene.* <!-- SOLSIM:END --> *Try: set the speed to 10 years/s and watch Saturn take about three seconds to circle the Sun while the readout's distance swings between roughly 9.0 and 10.1 AU; drag the year slider across its full 1800–2050 range and count about eight and a half Saturn orbits against more than twenty of Jupiter's; then switch the scale to true to open Saturn's own frame, tilted 26.7°, with the main rings, Enceladus and Titan drawn at true distance.* **Saturn** is the sixth planet from the [[Sun]] and the second largest in the [[PORTAL_Solar_System|Solar System]] after [[Jupiter]]. It is a [[Gas_giant|gas giant]] made mostly of [[Hydrogen|hydrogen]] and [[Helium|helium]], with an equatorial radius of 60,268 km, about 9.4 times Earth's, and a mass 95 times Earth's.[^nasa-fs] Its mean density, 687 kg/m³, is the lowest of any planet and below that of water, and its rapid rotation, once in about 10.7 hours, flattens it by nearly 10%.[^nasa-fs] It orbits the Sun at a mean distance of 1,432 million km (9.57 [[Astronomical_unit|AU]]) once every 29.4 years.[^nasa-fs][^jpl-t1] Saturn's interior holds a large, diffuse core of heavy elements inside a deep envelope of liquid metallic hydrogen, where electric currents generate a magnetic field somewhat weaker than Earth's at the cloud tops.[^mankovich2021][^smith1980] Its pale yellow clouds of ammonia ice hide deeper layers of ammonium hydrosulfide and water, and they carry some of the fastest winds in the Solar System, a hexagonal jet around the north pole, and giant storms that erupt roughly once per Saturnian year.[^west2009][^perezhoyos2005] The planet is best known for its bright [[Rings_of_Saturn|ring system]], made mostly of water ice, and it has 293 recognised moons, of which [[Titan_(moon)|Titan]] is the largest and [[Enceladus]] the most studied for habitability.[^poulet2002][^jpl-sats-disc] Known since prehistory, Saturn was visited by Pioneer 11, the two Voyagers and the Cassini orbiter, which ended its mission by diving into the planet in 2017.[^planetary-missions][^nasa-cassini-end] The explorer at the top of this page follows Saturn along its orbit computed from JPL elements; switching the scale to true opens the planet's own frame, drawn with its 26.7° axial tilt, the main rings from 74,658 to 136,775 km, and Titan at 1.22 million km.[^jpl-t1][^nasa-fs][^nasa-rings] ## Name and symbol The planet carries the name of Saturn, the Roman god of agriculture and wealth and father of Jupiter, whom the Romans equated with the Greek Cronus; modern Greek still calls the planet Kronos.[^greek-names] Its astronomical symbol, ♄, goes back to Greek astronomical papyri from Oxyrhynchus, where it began as a ligature of the letters kappa and rho, the first letters of *Kronos*, marked with a horizontal stroke as an abbreviation; a cross was added at the top much later.[^jones1999] The seventh day of the week is named after the planet: Latin *Saturni dies*, "Saturn's day", became Saturday in English.[^falk1999] ## Physical characteristics Saturn has no solid surface; its [[Hydrogen|hydrogen]]-rich atmosphere thickens smoothly into a liquid interior.[^melosh2011] The equatorial radius at the 1 bar level is 60,268 km and the polar radius 54,364 km, a flattening of 0.098, larger than that of any other planet.[^nasa-fs] Its mass of 5.683 × 10²⁶ kg is 95.16 times [[Earth]]'s but less than a third of [[Jupiter]]'s, so its [[Density|density]], 687 kg/m³, is only about 12% of Earth's.[^nasa-fs][^nasa-jupiter] Gravity at the 1 bar level is 8.96 m/s² at the equator and 12.14 m/s² at the poles, the difference coming from both the flattening and the spin; the escape velocity is 35.5 km/s.[^nasa-fs] Jupiter and Saturn together hold about 92% of the mass of all the planets.[^fortney2010] ### Internal structure Pressure and temperature rise steadily inward, and below a thin outer layer hydrogen is no longer an ideal gas: more than 99.9% of Saturn's mass lies at densities where hydrogen behaves as a liquid, and deeper still it becomes metallic.[^fortney2010] Gravity measurements combined with interior models gave a core of 9–22 Earth masses in 2004.[^fortney2004][^saumon2004] Cassini observations of waves in the C ring, excited by oscillations of the planet itself, have since shown a more gradual structure: a "diffuse core" of about 17 Earth masses in which heavy elements and hydrogen mix and which extends to about 60% of the planet's radius.[^mankovich2021] Overall the heavy elements are estimated at 19–31 Earth masses.[^guillot1999] Saturn radiates about 2.5 times as much energy as it receives from the [[Sun]]. Slow gravitational contraction, which powers Jupiter's excess heat, is probably not enough for a planet of Saturn's mass, and an additional source may be [[Helium|helium]] separating from hydrogen and sinking as droplets, releasing gravitational energy; this would also explain why the outer atmosphere is depleted in helium.[^depater2010][^guillot2009] ### Rotation Saturn's clouds rotate at different rates at different latitudes, so the planet's rotation is described by several systems. System III, based on periodic radio emission detected by [[Voyager_1]] and Voyager 2, gave 10 h 39 min 22.4 s.[^kaiser1980] When Cassini approached in 2004, the radio period had lengthened to about 10 h 45 min 45 s, showing that the radio signal does not track the deep interior.[^nasa-rotation2004] In 2007 the drift was traced to the plasma disc loaded with material from the geysers of [[Enceladus]], which drags on the magnetic field and makes it lag behind the planet.[^gurnett2007] Estimates of the true interior rotation have come from the gravity field, giving 10 h 32 min 35 s, and from ring seismology, giving 10 h 33 min 38 s.[^anderson2007][^mankovich2019] ### Atmosphere By volume the upper atmosphere is 96.3% molecular hydrogen and 3.25% helium, with about 0.45% methane and traces of ammonia, hydrogen deuteride and ethane.[^nasa-fs] Helium is depleted relative to its abundance in the Sun.[^guillot2009] Photochemistry driven by sunlight breaks methane apart in the upper atmosphere and builds ethane, acetylene and propane, whose distribution follows Saturn's seasons.[^guerlet2008] The clouds are layered by temperature: ammonia ice at 0.5–2 bar, ammonium hydrosulfide ice at 3–6 bar, water ice from about 2.5 to 9.5 bar, and droplets of [[Water|water]] with dissolved ammonia at 10–20 bar.[^west2009] The temperature at the 1 bar level is 134 K.[^nasa-fs] Saturn's bands resemble [[Jupiter]]'s but are fainter and much wider near the equator.[^orton2009] Winds reach about 400 m/s at low latitudes according to the NASA fact sheet, and Voyager data gave peaks near 500 m/s.[^nasa-fs][^solarviews-voyager] About once per Saturnian year, near northern summer, a Great White Spot storm erupts; they were recorded in 1876, 1903, 1933, 1960 and 1990,[^perezhoyos2005] and a giant storm followed in 2010.[^li2023] Radio observations with the Very Large Array show that such storms leave chemical traces deep in the atmosphere that last for centuries.[^li2023] A six-sided jet stream surrounds the north pole at about 78°N. Each side is about 14,500 km long, and the pattern rotates with a period close to that of the radio emission; laboratory experiments reproduce polygons like it in rotating fluids, as a [[Standing_wave|standing wave]] pattern.[^ball2006][^godfrey1988][^godfrey1990][^aguiar2010] At the south pole Cassini imaged a hurricane-like vortex about the size of Earth with a clearly defined eyewall, the first seen on a planet other than Earth.[^nasa-pia09187] Hubble images since 2023 have revealed a ten-sided wave around the south polar region near 63°S, announced in September 2026.[^sanchezlavega2026] ### Magnetosphere Saturn's magnetic field is a nearly symmetric dipole aligned with the rotation axis. At the equator it is about 0.2 gauss (20 μT), roughly a twentieth of Jupiter's and slightly weaker than Earth's, but because Saturn is so large its magnetic moment is about 580 times Earth's.[^smith1980] It is probably generated by currents in the metallic hydrogen layer.[^smith1980] The resulting magnetosphere is much smaller than Jupiter's; when Voyager 2 arrived under high [[Solar_wind|solar wind]] pressure its boundary lay only 19 Saturn radii, about 1.1 million km, from the planet.[^jpl-voyager-mag] [[Titan_(moon)|Titan]] orbits in its outer region and supplies it with [[Plasma_(physics)|plasma]] from its ionised upper atmosphere, and the planet has aurorae at both poles.[^smith1980][^windows-mag] ## Orbit and observation Saturn's [[Orbit|orbit]] has a semi-major axis of 1,432.0 million km and an eccentricity of 0.052, so its distance from the Sun varies between 1,357.6 and 1,506.5 million km, about 9.07 to 10.07 AU (derived). The sidereal period is 10,755.7 days, 29.45 years; with a semi-major axis of 9.537 AU this obeys [[Kepler's_laws_of_planetary_motion|Kepler's third law]], since 9.537³ ≈ 867 ≈ 29.45² (derived). The orbit is inclined 2.49° to the [[Ecliptic|ecliptic]].[^nasa-fs] Its axis is tilted 26.73° to the orbit, which gives the planet seasons and makes the [[Rings_of_Saturn|rings]] open and close as seen from Earth over the course of each orbit.[^nasa-fs] Only one Trojan asteroid of Saturn is known, 2019 UO14, reported in 2024 near the L4 point 60° ahead of the planet; secular resonances make such orbits unstable over long periods.[^hui2024][^hou2014] In the explorer, the orbit is drawn from JPL's approximate elements, so the changing distance and speed in the readout reflect the real eccentricity.[^jpl-t1] ### Observation Saturn is the most distant of the five planets easily seen with the unaided eye, a steady yellowish point that takes about 29.4 years to travel once around the zodiac.[^nmm-saturn] Oppositions come every 378 days.[^nasa-fs] Its brightness depends strongly on how widely the rings are open: at opposition the planet and rings together average magnitude 0.05 and can reach −0.55.[^nasa-fs] The rings can be seen with a small telescope magnifying about 30 times.[^eastman1998] Twice per Saturnian orbit, about every 15 years, Earth passes through the ring plane and the rings, only metres thick, almost vanish; the most recent crossing was in 2025.[^classical-astronomy] The [[Moon]] occults Saturn in seasons of monthly events lasting about a year, separated by several years without them, because the two orbits are inclined.[^horner2014] ## Natural satellites JPL's table of satellites recognised by the International Astronomical Union lists 293 moons of Saturn, far more than any other planet.[^jpl-sats-disc] In addition, the rings contain countless moonlets tens to hundreds of metres across, revealed by the "propeller" disturbances they cause, which are not counted as moons.[^tiscareno2008] Most of the large moons are named after the Titans of Greek mythology.[^barton1946] Titan alone holds more than 90% of the mass orbiting Saturn, rings included.[^brunier2005] It is larger than the planet [[Mercury_(planet)|Mercury]],[^nasa-ssat] is the only moon with a dense atmosphere, confirmed by Gerard Kuiper in 1944, and has lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons near its poles.[^kuiper1944][^rincon2007] Rhea, the second-largest moon, has a tenuous oxygen atmosphere, and Cassini particle data have been interpreted as a disc of debris, possibly with faint rings, around it.[^nasa-rhea2010][^jones2008] Enceladus, only 504 km across, erupts plumes of water vapour and ice from its south pole; salt-rich grains in them point to a liquid-water ocean in contact with rock, and Cassini found molecular hydrogen in the plume in 2015, a potential energy source for microbes.[^nasa-enceladus2011][^nasa-oceanworlds2017][^nasa-ssat] In 2013 Cassini imaged a disturbance at the edge of the A ring that may mark a small moon forming.[^nasa-peggy2014] Of all these moons, the explorer's true-scale frame draws only Titan and Enceladus. ## Planetary rings The rings extend from the inner edge of the D ring, 66,900 km from Saturn's centre and so only about 6,630 km above the cloud tops (derived), to the outer edge of the A ring at 136,780 km, yet the main rings are only about 5–30 m thick.[^nasa-rings] They are made almost entirely of [[Water|water]] ice, with small amounts of darker material including tholins and amorphous [[Carbon|carbon]], in particles from dust grains up to about 10 m across.[^poulet2002][^porco-ciclops] From the inside out the main rings are named D, C, B and A, with the Cassini Division, about 4,800 km wide (derived), between B and A and the narrow F ring just outside; fainter G and E rings lie farther out.[^nasa-rings] Small shepherd moons such as Prometheus and Pandora confine the F ring, and moons embedded in the rings, such as Pan and Atlas, raise waves whose shape has been used to measure their masses.[^windows-rings][^jpl-cassini2005] The age of the rings is disputed. They could be ancient, formed with Saturn about 4.5 billion years ago, for instance from the icy mantle of a large moon that spiralled into the planet, or during the [[Late_Heavy_Bombardment|Late Heavy Bombardment]].[^canup2010][^charnoz2009] Cassini measurements favour youth: the rings are bright and little polluted by the micrometeoroid dust that falls on them constantly, which limits their exposure to no more than a few hundred million years.[^kempf2023] One proposal attributes young rings to a lost moon, "Chrysalis", whose destruction could also explain Saturn's axial tilt; another to a collision between moons.[^wisdom2022][^teodoro2023] Far outside the main system, the tenuous Phoebe ring, tilted 27° and extending to about 12 million km, shares the retrograde orbit of the moon Phoebe that supplies it.[^verbiscer2009] In the explorer's true-scale frame the main rings are drawn as a single band from the inner edge of the C ring to the outer edge of the A ring, with the F ring as a thin line; gaps and the faint outer rings are not drawn.[^nasa-rings] ## History of observation and exploration The study of Saturn falls into three periods: naked-eye observation in antiquity, telescopic observation from 1610, and exploration by spacecraft since 1979. ### Pre-telescopic observation Saturn has been known since prehistoric times as the slowest and most distant of the planets visible without a telescope.[^nmm-observing] Babylonian astronomers recorded its motions systematically.[^sachs1974] The Greeks called it Phainon and later identified it with Cronus; the Romans named it after their god Saturnus.[^starrynight2006] Ptolemy based his model of Saturn's orbit on observations made at opposition.[^popsci1893] In Chinese and Japanese tradition, Saturn is the "earth star", following the classification of the five elements.[^degroot1912][^crump1992] ### Telescopic pre-spaceflight observations Galileo turned his telescope on Saturn in 1610, but his instrument showed the rings only as two lumps on either side, which he took for companions.[^cain2008] [[Christiaan_Huygens|Christiaan Huygens]], with a better telescope, recognised a thin, flat ring in 1655 and published his interpretation in 1659; in 1655 he also discovered [[Titan_(moon)|Titan]].[^micek-history] Giovanni Domenico Cassini found Iapetus, Rhea, Tethys and Dione and in 1675 the gap in the rings now called the Cassini Division.[^micek-history] William Herschel discovered Mimas and [[Enceladus]] in 1789, Hyperion was found in 1848, and in 1899 William Henry Pickering found Phoebe, the first moon known to orbit in the retrograde direction.[^barton1946] In 1944 Kuiper detected methane in Titan's spectrum, the first evidence of an atmosphere on any moon.[^kuiper1944] ### Spaceflight missions Pioneer 11 made the first flyby in September 1979, passing about 20,000 km above the cloud tops, discovering the thin F ring and measuring the temperature of Titan.[^nasa-pioneer] [[Voyager_1]] followed in November 1980, returning the first high-resolution images of the planet, rings and moons and flying close to Titan, whose haze hid its surface. Voyager 2 arrived in August 1981 and used Saturn's gravity to continue to [[Uranus]].[^planetary-missions] The Cassini–Huygens mission, a collaboration between [[NASA]], ESA and the Italian Space Agency, entered orbit on 1 July 2004. The Huygens probe, released in December 2004, descended through Titan's atmosphere and landed on its surface on 14 January 2005.[^lebreton2005] Over thirteen years Cassini tracked lightning about a thousand times more powerful than Earth's, found the plumes of Enceladus in 2005–2006, mapped Titan's hydrocarbon seas, and discovered new moons and faint rings.[^sciencedaily-lightning][^nasa-enceladus2006][^rincon2007] On 15 September 2017, after a final series of orbits between the planet and its innermost rings, it was steered into Saturn's atmosphere to avoid contaminating the moons.[^nasa-cassini-end] NASA's Dragonfly rotorcraft, due to launch in July 2028, will study Titan after arriving in 2034.[^nasa-dragonfly2024][^nasa-dragonfly2025] ## In fiction Saturn has featured in fiction at least since Voltaire's *Micromégas* of 1752, in which a visitor from Sirius travels with a Saturnian.[^mckinney2005] Early stories generally treated it as a solid world; later ones reflect its gaseous nature, and its moons, especially Titan, have become settings in their own right.[^westfahl2021][^stableford2006] ## See also - [[Rings_of_Saturn]] - [[Titan_(moon)|Titan]] · [[Enceladus]] - [[Gas_giant]] · [[Jupiter]] · [[Uranus]] · [[Neptune]] - [[Formation_and_evolution_of_the_Solar_System]] - Moons of Saturn · Cassini–Huygens - [[PORTAL_Solar_System|Solar System portal]] ## Notes Derived numbers are computed from the cited values: the perihelion and aphelion distances of 1,357.554 and 1,506.527 million km divided by 149.598 million km per AU give 9.07 and 10.07 AU; the sidereal period of 10,755.699 days divided by 365.25 gives 29.45 years; and 250 years on the explorer's slider divided by 29.45 years gives about 8.5 orbits (and by Jupiter's 11.86 years, about 21). ## References [^nasa-fs]: Williams, D. R. "Saturn Fact Sheet". NASA NSSDCA, last updated 18 March 2025. https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/saturnfact.html (fetched 2026-09-18). [^nasa-jupiter]: Williams, D. R. "Jupiter Fact Sheet". NASA NSSDCA. https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/jupiterfact.html (fetched 2026-09-18). [^nasa-rings]: Williams, D. R. "Saturnian Rings Fact Sheet". NASA NSSDCA, last updated 19 April 2022. https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/satringfact.html (fetched 2026-09-18). [^nasa-ssat]: Williams, D. R. "Saturnian Satellite Fact Sheet". NASA NSSDCA. https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/saturniansatfact.html (fetched 2026-09-18). [^jpl-t1]: JPL Solar System Dynamics. "Approximate Positions of the Planets", Table 1. https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/planets/approx_pos.html [^jpl-sats-disc]: JPL Solar System Dynamics. "Planetary Satellite Discovery Circumstances". https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sats/discovery.html (fetched 2026-09-18; 293 satellites of Saturn listed). 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(2006). *Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia*. Taylor & Francis, pp. 458–459. ISBN 978-0-415-97460-8. ## Further reading - Dougherty, M. K.; Esposito, L. W.; Krimigis, S. M. (eds.) (2009). *Saturn from Cassini-Huygens*. Springer. ISBN 978-1-4020-9216-9. - Baines, K. H.; Flasar, F. M.; Krupp, N.; Stallard, T. (eds.) (2018). *Saturn in the 21st Century*. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-68393-7. - de Pater, I.; Lissauer, J. J. (2010). *Planetary Sciences*, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-85371-2. ## External links - NASA Science: Saturn — https://science.nasa.gov/saturn/ - NASA Cassini mission — https://science.nasa.gov/mission/cassini/ - NASA NSSDCA Saturn Fact Sheet — https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/saturnfact.html - ESA: Cassini–Huygens — https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Cassini-Huygens - JPL Planetary Satellite Discovery Circumstances — https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sats/discovery.html ## Wikipedia : Wikitube **Strict pair:** [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn) : [Wikitube](https://en.wikitube.io/wiki/Saturn) · pinned revision [1375061756](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1375061756) · 2026-09-18 ## Previous hub tags Hubs: `Life_Physics`. Portals: [[PORTAL_Solar_System]]. --- *Solar System portal child articles, wave 1 · 2026-09-18 · drafted · row SOL-016 · explorer state `?obj=Saturn`.* <!-- hub_tags: Life_Physics · PORTAL_Solar_System -->