My Science School

          Neptune boasts one of the most violent weather systems known. When the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by in 1989, it discovered that winds around the planet’s equator reached speeds of 2100km/h (1240mph) — faster than anywhere else in the Solar System. Heat from inside the planet means that Neptune's atmosphere is turbulent and constantly changing.

          Neptune is the most distant planet from the Sun, with temperatures that plunge down to 55 Kelvin, or -218 degrees Celsius. You would think that a planet that cold would be frozen and locked down, with very little weather. But you’d be very wrong. In fact, the weather on Neptune is some of the most violent weather in the Solar System. Just like Jupiter and Saturn, Neptune has bands of storms that circle the planet. While the wind speeds on Jupiter can reach 550 km/hour – twice the speed of powerful hurricanes on Earth, that’s nothing compared to Neptune. Astronomers have clocked winds on Neptune traveling at 2,100 km/hour.

          So why can the winds on Neptune reach such huge speeds? Astronomers think that the cold temperatures on Neptune might have something to do with that after all. The cold temperatures might decrease the friction in the system, so that winds can get going fast on Neptune.

         During its 1989 flyby, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft discovered the Great Dark Spot on Neptune. Similar to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, this is an anti-cyclonic storm measuring 13,000 km x 6,600 km across. A few years later, however, the Hubble Space Telescope failed to see the Great Dark Spot, but it did see different storms. This might mean that storms on Neptune don’t last as long as they do on Jupiter or even Saturn.

          The more active weather on Neptune might be due, in part, to its higher internal heat. Although Neptune is much more distant than Uranus from the Sun, receiving 40% less sunlight, temperatures on the surface of the two planets are roughly similar. In fact, Neptune radiates 2.61 times as much energy as it receives from the Sun. This is enough heat to help drive the fastest winds in the Solar System.

          Neptune’s discovery was unusual in that it was found with calculations rather than with a telescope. Astronomers observing Uranus noticed that it was drifting off the expected path of its orbit. Two mathematicians, working independently of each other, thought that this was because the gravitational pull of an unknown planet was disturbing Uranus’ orbit. The calculations of both men led to the planet being discovered in 1846.

          Billions of stars may twinkle above our heads at night, but there still remain only eight planets in our solar system. Jupiter is massive; Venus is our closest neighbour; Saturn looks awesome; Mars has a chocolate named after it; and Pluto plays the role of the hipster's favourite. But our favourite is the much under-appreciated, Neptune.

          On September 23, 1846, German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle first glimpsed Neptune, 2.7 billion km from Earth, through his telescope, the achromatic refractor, invented by Joseph von Fraunhofer in 1829.

          It helped that he knew where to look. Previous astronomers had detected irregularities in Uranus' orbit that could only be explained by the existence of a father planet's gravity. This spurred Urbanin Le Verrier and John Couch Adams, who worked in Paris and Cambridge respectively, to begin their own separate calculations to determine the nature and position of such a planet. Galle would find it less than one degree from the location predicted by Verrier.

          Though initially referred to as Le Verrier's planet, Galle suggested Janus, the Roman 'God of beginnings', but it was eventually named Neptune by Le Verrier himself - maintaining the trend of naming planets after deities in Greco-Roman mythology, in this case the Roman 'God of the sea'.

          For 84 years Neptune remained the furthers point in our solar system, until the discovery of Pluto. However, with Pluto's status as a planet having long been disputed the decision was finally taken in 2006 for the International Astronomical Union to fully defined the word 'planet' for the first time. This definition meant that Pluto would be reclassified as a dwarf planet, therefore officially reinstating Neptune once again as the outermost known planet in our solar system.

          Planets have the colors that they have because of what they are made of and how their surfaces or atmospheres reflect and absorb sunlight. Mercury has a dark gray, rocky surface which is covered with a thick layer of dust. The surface is thought to be made up of igneous silicate rocks and dust. Venus is entirely covered with a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere and sulphuric acid clouds which give it a light yellowish appearance. Earth shows its blue oceans and white clouds as well as its green and brownish land. Mars is covered with a fine dust which contains iron oxide (rust). This gives Mars its orange color. Jupiter is a giant gas planet with an outer atmosphere that is mostly hydrogen and helium with small amounts of water droplets, ice crystals, ammonia crystals, and other elements. Clouds of these elements create shades of white, orange, brown and red. Saturn is also a giant gas planet with an outer atmosphere that is mostly hydrogen and helium. Its atmosphere has traces of ammonia, phosphine, water vapor, and hydrocarbons giving it a yellowish-brown color. Uranus is a gas planet which has a lot of methane gas mixed in with its mainly hydrogen and helium atmosphere. This methane gas gives Uranus a greenish blue color Neptune also has some methane gas in it’s mainly hydrogen and helium atmosphere, giving it a bluish color.

          Uranus’ colour comes from the presence of methane clouds in the planet’s atmosphere. Methane absorbs red light, reflecting only blue and green. Neptune’s upper atmosphere contains more methane than Uranus’, which gives the planet’s clouds their striking blue colour.

          Because of this, its poles are sometimes pointed almost directly at the Sun. Uranus' atmosphere is made up of hydrogen, helium, and methane. The temperature in the upper atmosphere is very cold. The cold methane gas is what gives Uranus its blue-green color.

          The planet Uranus tilts over so far on its axis that it rotates on its side. Because of this, its poles are sometimes pointed almost directly at the Sun. Uranus' atmosphere is made up of hydrogen, helium, and methane. The temperature in the upper atmosphere is very cold. The cold methane gas is what gives Uranus its blue-green color. The rapid rotation of Uranus causes winds up to 600 kilometers per hour to blow in its atmosphere. Uranus has eleven known rings which contain dark, boulder-sized particles. Uranus has 27 named moons. Some of these moons are less than 100 kilometers wide and black as coal. (The others are Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune.) Its atmosphere is composed primarily of hydrogen and helium, with a small amount of methane and traces of water and ammonia. Uranus gets its blue-green color from methane gas. Sunlight is reflected from Uranus's cloud tops, which lie beneath a layer of methane gas.

          Neptune's atmosphere is made up of hydrogen (80%), helium (19%) and methane (1%). Despite only being a small fraction of the overall atmospheric composition, methane in the upper atmosphere is responsible for Neptune’s blue colour. Methane absorbs the red part of the light from the sun and reflects the blue light. This makes Neptune look blue.

          Although Uranus is devoid of surface features, its many moons display a fascinating portrait of a violent history. The cracked and distorted surfaces of Uranus' moons are believed to have been caused by water. As liquid water rose from the interior of the moons, it froze and expanded, causing the crust to buckle outward. Miranda, one of Uranus' larger outer moons, has one of the most chaotic surface patterns of anybody in the Solar System. The moon, shown left, resembles a patchwork, with parts of its core now on the surface, and parts of the crust buried deep underground. Scientists believe that this is because the moon was at one time pulled apart, and has gradually reformed.

          Uranus, the seventh planet of the Solar System, has 27 known moons, most of which are named after characters that appear in, or are mentioned in, the works of William Shakespeare and Aloxander Pope. Uranus's moons are divided into three groups: thirteen inner moons, five major moons, and nine irregular moons. The inner moons are small dark bodies that share common properties and origins with Uranus's rings. The five major moons are ellipsoidal, indicating that they reached hydrostatic equilibrium at some point in their past (and may still be in equilibrium), and four of them show signs of internally driven processes such as canyon formation and volcanism on their surfaces. The largest of these five, Titania, is 1,578 km in diameter and the eighth-largest moon in the Solar System, about one-twentieth the mass of the Earth's Moon. The orbits of the regular moons are nearly coplanar with Uranus's equator, which is tilted 97.77° to its orbit. Uranus's irregular moons have elliptical and strongly inclined (mostly retrograde) orbits at large distances from the planet.

          William Herschel discovered the first two moons, Titania and Oberon, in 1787. The other three ellipsoidal moons were discovered in 1851 by William Lassell (Arial and Umbriel) and in 1948 by Gerard Kuiper (Miranda). These five have planetary mass, and so would be considered (dwarf) planets if they were in direct orbit about the Sun. The remaining moons were discovered after 1985, either during the Voyager 2 flyby mission or with the aid of advanced Earth-based telescopes.

          The surface of Uranus may look as motionless as that of a snooker ball, but in reality the planet is no less turbulent than Jupiter and Saturn. Like its larger neighbours, Uranus does have bands of clouds that blow around the planet at incredible speeds, but because of an overlying layer of methane in the upper atmosphere, they are very faint. Only enhanced infrared pictures, like those taken by the Voyager space probe (right), show the weather on Uranus.

          Uranus is one of two ice-giant planets in the solar system. Like Neptune, the other ice giant, it is sometimes also called a gas giant. Information about Uranus comes mostly from data gathered by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft, which approached within 80,000 kilometers (50,000 miles) of the planet’s surface. Uranus does not display the type of geological activity associated with terrestrial planets such as Earth and Mars. The rings and moons of Uranus, however, do exhibit recognizable geological features.

          Scientists report that between 80 percent and 85 percent of Uranus consist if an ice and rock mass. The ices are mostly frozen water, ammonia and methane around a liquid core. An envelope of hydrogen and helium, with traces of methane and ammonia, forms the planets’ atmosphere. Extreme temperatures and pressures in the planet’s interior could convert the carbon content of methane into diamond. According to space researchers Mona Delitsky, from California Specialty Engineering and Kevin Baines from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the temperature at Uranus’ core could be 5,727 degrees Celsius (10,340 degrees Fahrenheit). This temperature could produce diamonds the size of a hand that precipitate from the liquid.

          Thirteen rings have been identified around Uranus. These consist of a combination of ice and rock and are replenished with dust from meteor impacts -- also called space weathering -- on Mab, one of Uranus’ small outer moons. Some could be Centaurs, captured asteroids that orbit the sun together with Uranus, or comets. Uranus’ 27 identified moons appear to be made of ice and rock. The satellite system is chaotic and unstable. Astronomers predict that within a few million years, the moons could collide.

          All of Uranus’ moons consist of ice and rock. Miranda and Ariel, two of the planets smaller moons, have features that indicate ongoing geological activity. Miranda’s diameter is just 450 kilometers (281 miles), yet it has surface fault scarps 10 kilometers (6 miles) high. Ariel, which has an 1,160 kilometers (725 miles) diameter, has canyons that could be between 3 and 5 kilometers (1.9 to 3.1 miles) deep. Miranda has areas of concentric fractures with surface volcanism called coronae, while the Ariel surface has ridged and smooth plains with surface volcanism. The extruded material could be ammonia and water ices that were melted by tidal heating of the moons’ interiors.

        Uranus is the third largest planet in our Solar System. It is unusual because it appears to lie on its side. Uranus is tipped on its side and is the only planet to roll around the sun like a barrel instead of spinning upright. Its 11 faint, black rings and 17 moons spin around it like a ferries wheel. It is thought that this is because an object the size of Earth collided with Uranus billions of years ago. The incredible force of the impact knocked the planet onto its side. This means that each pole has 21 years of continual sunlight, and then is plunged into 21 years of perpetual night.

        Uranus is named after the Greek father of the gods, but many questions whether it deserves such a grand title. This is because Uranus is thought by many to be the blandest planet in the solar system. However, Uranus has many interesting features of its own. It rolls around the sun like a barrel, and its weather, although it can't be seen by naked eye, is highly active.

        Uranus is often unfairly labelled the most boring planet in the solar system. A thick layer of methane in the upper clouds absorbs red light, giving the planet its uniform aquamarine colour. There is little evidence on Uranus bland face of much activity. Viewed normally, the planet has the complexion of a snooker ball. However, the Voyager space probe's infrared pictures of the planet showed it to have bands of weather activity just like the planets Jupiter and Saturn.

        Uranus itself may be devoid of surface features, but its moons carry a fascinating portrait of a violent past. The bizarre alien landscapes of many of Uranus moons are thought to have been created by water. Scientists believe that as liquid water rose from the hot interior of the moons, it froze and expanded. This caused the crust to buckle outwards. Miranda has the most chaotic surface of any moon. Some parts of her core are now on her surface, and some parts of her crust have been buried. This is most likely to be because the moon has at one time been pulled apart and has gradually reformed.

One of Saturn’s satellites, Titan, is the only moon in the Solar System to have a substantial atmosphere. It is covered in thick clouds, and scientists believe conditions beneath these clouds may be similar to those on Earth billions of years ago. Although temperatures on the planet are believed to be well below freezing level, some scientists believe that internal heating may allow areas of liquid water to exist on the moon's surface. Some believe that primitive life may even exist on the moon. The European Space Agency's Huygens probe has been designed to parachute down through Titan's atmosphere in order to investigate the moon at first hand (right).

An orange haze surrounding Titan kept its surface a mystery for Earth's scientists until the arrival of the Cassini mission in 2004. Titan’s atmosphere extends about 370 miles high (about 600 kilometers), which makes it a lot higher than Earth's atmosphere. Because the atmosphere is so high, Titan was thought to be the largest moon in the solar system for a long time. It wasn't until 1980 that Voyager was close enough to discover it was actually smaller than Ganymede.

Titan’s atmosphere is active and complex, and it is mainly composed of nitrogen (95 percent) and methane (5 percent). Titan also has a presence of organic molecules that contain carbon and hydrogen, and that often include oxygen and other elements similar to what is found in Earth's atmosphere and that are essential for life. 

There is an unsolved mystery surrounding Titan's atmosphere: Because methane is broken down by sunlight, scientists believe there is another source that replenishes what is lost. One potential source of methane is volcanic activity, but this has yet to be confirmed.

Titan's atmosphere may escape to space in a similar way that Earth’s atmosphere does. The Cassini spacecraft has detected polar winds that draw methane and nitrogen (charged with interactions with light) out along Saturn's magnetic field and out of the atmosphere. A similar process is believed to happen on Earth with our own magnetic field. 

"At Saturn's largest moon, Titan, Cassini and Huygens showed us one of the most Earth-like worlds we've ever encountered, with weather, climate and geology that provide new ways to understand our home planet.

Picture Credit : Google

Nobody knows for sure how planets get their rings. In the 19th century, the French mathematician Edouard Roche suggested that if any large object, such as a moon or comet, got too close to a planet, it could be torn apart by the planet’s tidal force. The object would be pulled one way by its orbit and another by the planet’s gravity. Once it reached the “Roche limit”, it would break apart into tiny fragments.

One theory that astronomers have come up with is that the rings are actually bits and pieces of an old moon, or moons that used to orbit Saturn. In this theory, the old moon was ripped apart somehow. Saturn’s moons mostly have icy outer coats and layers. If the ice layers were stripped away, and the rest of the moon crashed in Saturn, rings could be able to form.  It could have been ripped apart by Saturn’s gravity and gravity from other moons. The pushing and pulling may have caused dust and pieces of the old moon to scatter and orbit around the planet, creating a ring.

Another theory says that the rings may have been formed as debris, dust, comets, and asteroids passed near Saturn. As these materials passed, Saturn’s immense gravity may have pulled them towards it and trapped them in an orbit around the planet. Similar to the moon theory, the trapped comets and asteroids may have been broken apart by forces of gravity exerted by Saturn and other debris.  The debris also, most likely, runs into each other and breaks into even smaller pieces. Over time, the fragments of rock and debris flattened and shaped into the rings we see now.

Some astronomers think that the much of the material that composes the rings actually came from the time when Saturn first formed. As Saturn formed, not all the surrounding dust, material, or gas went into Saturn’s final form. Therefore, Saturn may not have used the material to create its body, but its gravity kept the leftover and unused dust and debris in its orbit, creating its rings.

In recent studies, a group of mathematicians believe that the rings were formed by a chain of collisions created between particles moving. These mathematicians think that large particles ran into each other at slow rates, and these crashing particles caused smaller particles to run into each other at much higher speeds. The debris in Saturn’s rings could have been smaller remnants of larger events in Saturn’s past, which explains why the debris in Saturn’s rings varies in size.

Two of Saturn’s moons - Pandora and Prometheus — are known as shepherd moons. They orbit either side of the narrow F rings, and have earned their name because their gravitational pull prevents the particles in this ring from straying out into space.

Saturn, which is the second largest planet in our solar system, is known to have multiple rings and satellites. In 1979, Pioneer 11 discovered the F Ring, located 3,000 kilometres (1900 miles) beyond the outer edge of the A Ring. The F Ring is very active, with features changing on a timescale of hours.

The F Ring is also very narrow with a width of only a few hundred kilometres, and has two shepherd satellites called Prometheus and Pandora, which orbit inside and outside the ring, respectively. Although the Voyager and Cassini spacecraft later made detailed observations of the F Ring and its shepherd satellites, their origin has not been clarified.

According to the latest satellite formation theory, Saturn used to have ancient rings containing many more particles than they do today, and satellites formed from spreading and accretion of these particles. During the final stage of satellite formation, multiple small satellites tend to form near the outer edge of the ring. On the other hand, observations by Cassini indicate that the small satellites orbiting near the outer edge of the main ring system have a dense core.

In their simulations using in part computer systems at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Hyodo and Ohtsuki revealed that the F Ring and its shepherd satellites formed as these small satellites with a dense core collided and partially disintegrated. In other words, the system of the F Ring and its shepherd satellites is a natural outcome of the formation process of Saturn’s ring-satellite system.

This new finding is expected to help elucidate the formation of satellite systems both within and outside our solar system. For example, the above formation mechanism can also be applied to the rings and shepherd satellites of Uranus, which are similar to those of Saturn.

Although Saturn is considered a more beautiful planet than its neighbour Jupiter, its weather is no less violent. It spins so quickly that it bulges at its centre, creating 1600k/ph (1,000mph) winds. Every 30 Earth years, a giant raging storm breaks out on Saturn, spreading across the entire planet. Such storms start when bubbles of hot gas rise up in the atmosphere.

Jupiter is well known for the storms that rage across its upper atmosphere, especially the Great Red Spot. But Saturn has storms too. They’re not as large, intense or large lived, but compared to Earth, they’re enormous. And Saturn has one of the big mysteries in the Solar System; a hexagon-shaped storms at its poles.

Winds blow hard on Saturn. The highest velocities are near the equator, where easterly blowing winds can reach speeds of 1,800 km/h. The wind speeds drop off as you travel towards the poles. Like Jupiter, storms can appear in the bands that circle the planet. One of the largest of these was the Great White Spot, observed by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990. These storms seem to appear once every year on Saturn (once every 30 Earth years).

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft discovered static hexagonal storm circling around Saturn’s North Pole, including a clearly defined eye wall – just like a hurricane. Each side on the northern polar hexagon is approximately 13,800 km long, and the whole structure rotates once every 10 hours and 39 minutes; the same as a day on Saturn.

Here’s an article about a time when Cassini tracked a long-lived lighting on Saturn, and another about the strange “Dragon Strom” seen in the planet’s southern hemisphere.

For a long time astronomers believed that Saturn was the only planet with rings. However, in 1977, astronomers studying Uranus noticed that as it moved through the sky; the light from stars behind it twinkled, suggesting the presence of rings. In 1986, the Voyager 2 space probe flew past the planet and photographed 11 very faint, black rings. Both Jupiter and Neptune have ring systems that are very difficult to spot from Earth.

Saturn is not the only planet in our solar system that has rings, in fact all the giant gas planets have them: Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune. However, these other ring systems are extremely thin and almost impossible to see. Planets like the Earth, Mars or Venus are made of rocky material and have no rings.

The solar system formed from a cloud of cold gas that collapsed due to gravity. A big glob of stuff formed in the center and eventually became the Sun. Meanwhile, some of the cloud material orbited around the proto-Sun and flattened into a disk. In the disk, some matter came together to form small planetoids that slowly grew. The matter that was closer to the center was also warmer so only the more dense stuff such as metals and rocks combined together to form planets; the warm gas was moving too fast to get caught. Farther away, everything was cooler so gases like hydrogen and helium could also get sucked up by the new planets. So the planets closer to the Sun (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) are small and rocky while the ones farther away (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) are big gas giants.

Because it was cooler farther away from the Sun it seems that it was easier for the big gas giants to also form moons (in fact there is quite a controversy regarding how the Earth and Mars got their satellites). As it turns out, these moons probably help keep trapped material that the planet has caught in rings instead of flying away or crashing into the planet. In addition, the rings seem to be partly made of frozen gases which don't exist closer to the Sun. So the bottom line is that the farther away gas giants are much more likely to be able to form and keep rings than the inner rocky planets.

The voyager space probes took many pictures of Saturn's rings, showing them to he made up of countless hundreds of ringlets. These have been separated into different divisions. Three of these divisions can be seen from Earth: the outer A ring, the bright B ring and the inner C ring. The E ring is the furthest from Saturn, stretching nearly 500,000km (310,000 miles) from the planet. None of the rings is ever more than 1.5km (0.9 miles) thick.

The rings of Saturn are the most extensive ring system of any planet in the Solar System. They consist of countless small particles, ranging in size from micrometers to meters that orbit about Saturn. The ring particles are made almost entirely of water ice, with a trace component of rocky material. There is still no consensus as to their mechanism of formation. Although theoretical models indicated that the rings were likely to have formed early in the Solar System's history new data from Cassini suggest they formed relatively late.

Although reflection from the rings increases Saturn's brigthness, they are not visible from Earth with unaided vision. In 1610, the year after Galileo Galilei turned a telescope to the sky, he became the first person to observe Saturn's rings, though he could not see them well enough to discern their true nature. In 1655, Christiaan Huygens was the first person to describe them as a disk surrounding Saturn. Although many people think of Saturn's rings as being made up of a series of tiny ringlets, true gaps are few. It is more correct to think of the rings as an annular disk with concentric local maxima and minima in density and brightness. On the scale of the clumps within the rings there is much empty space.

The rings have numerous gaps where particle density drops sharply: two opened by known moons embedded within them, and many others at locations of known destabilizing orbital resonances with the moons of Saturn. Other gaps remain unexplained. Stabilizing resonances, on the other hand, are responsible for the longevity of several rings, such as the Titan Ringlet and the G Ring.

Well beyond the main rings is the Phoebe ring, which is presumed to originate from Phoebe and thus to share its retrograde orbital motion. It is aligned with the plane of Saturn's orbit. Saturn has an axial tilt of 27 degrees, so this ring is tilted at an angle of 27 degrees to the more visible rings orbiting above Saturn's equator.

Picture Credit : Google

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

In 1610, when Galileo Galilei first began to look at Saturn through his homemade telescope, he thought that Saturn's rings were actually two moons. He called these moons "Saturn's ears". Forty -five years later, the astronomer Chris tiaan Huygens realized that these moons were actually a series of beautiful rings surrounding the planet. With the photographs provided by the Pioneer and Voyager probes, scientists now know more about these rings than ever before.

Saturn is the second largest planet of our solar system but this fact does not make it unique and attractive. The most beautiful and amazing thing related to Saturn is its wonderful ring system which surrounds the planet making it the most mysterious planet of our solar system. This ring system is composed of many ringlets and gaps and it is inclined to the orbital plane of Saturn by 27 degrees. The theory behind this amazing ring system is not complete till today there are lots of mysteries behind them and their origin.

History of the discovery of ring system around Saturn is also very interesting. Galileo was the first person who turned up his self-made telescope towards the sky. In 1610, he looked at Saturn and found that there is something on the both side of Saturn. So he concluded that “Saturn is not a single body but it is composed of three bodies. Middle one is three times larger than the side ones.” He called them Saturn’s children. In 1612, the plane of the ring with respect to Earth got changed and ring got vanished. Now Galileo got totally puzzled he wrote that Saturn had swallowed its children in fear of losing them in the space. In 1613, once again plane of ring changed and the ring appears again so Galileo was not able to conclude anything from these observations except surprise. He also called them “Ears of Saturn”.

In 1655, Christiaan Huygens used the 50 times more powerful telescope than that used by Galileo and concluded, “Saturn is surrounded by thin and flat rings which are somewhere touched to Saturn and inclined to elliptic.” Robert Hooke also noted the casting of the shadow of Saturn on the plane of the ring. In 1675, Giovanni Domenico Cassini noted that Saturn ring is composed of many ringlets with gaps between them. The largest gap was named Cassini Division after his name. Its width is 4800 km and is situated between ring A and Ring B.

Picture Credit : Google