Saturn’s rings are made from millions of tiny individual satellites, or moonlets. Each of these particles is like a dirty snowball of ice, dust and rock. These range in size from less than a centimetre to over a kilometre in diameter.
Saturn is sometimes called the” Jewel of the Solar System” because its ring system looks like a crown. The rings are well known, but often the question” what are Saturn’s rings made of” arises. Those rings are made up of dust, rock, and ice accumulated from passing comets, meteorite impacts on Saturn’s moons, and the planet’s gravity pulling material from the moons. Some of the materials in the ring system are as small as grains of sand; others are larger than tall buildings, while a few are up to a kilometer across. Deepening the mystery about the moons is the fact that each ring orbits at a different speed around the planet.
Saturn is not the only planet with a ring system. All of the gas giants have rings, in fact. Saturn’s rings stand out because they are the largest and most vivid. The rings have a thickness of up to one kilometer and they span up to 482,000 km from the center of the planet.
The rings are named in alphabetical order according to when they were discovered. That makes it a little confusing when listing them in order from the planet. Below is a list of the main rings and gaps between them along with distances from the center of the planet and their widths.
Picture Credit : Google
