Saturn's Rings
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Transcript: Saturn's rings were first seen by Galileo in 1610. However, with the poor optics of his early telescope Galileo only saw fuzzy blobs on either side of the planet, and he actually drew Saturn as triple planet. In 1655, Christian Huygens used a superior telescope to see that the blobs were in fact a ring system encircling the planet along its equator. Even with a backyard telescope the rings are clearly visible, and they present a different appearance in terms of their angle and tilt as seen from the Earth throughout Saturn's 29 year orbit of the Sun.
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Transcript: The interior of Saturn is almost certainly very similar to the interior of Jupiter, grading down from a pure simple gas in the outer atmosphere region towards molecular gas lower down, when the temperature is still cold but the pressure is high, towards metallic hydrogen at a point...
Published 07/21/11
Transcript: Saturn, sixth planet out from the Sun, is second only to Jupiter in size and mass. Its atmospheric composition is also similar to the chemical composition of the Sun, 90 percent hydrogen, 5 percent helium, plus methane, ammonia, water vapor, and other gases. The temperature is also...
Published 07/21/11
Transcript: Saturn is famous for its beautiful ring system, but all four of the gas giant planets have thin and delicate ring systems. The other three were discovered with space probes in the last few decades. Jupiter has a single ring with a sharp outer edge and a diffuse inner edge made of...
Published 07/21/11
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