Has a massive ring system, some are 2 Km thick in areas
Has almost 70 moons, 2 of them are about the size of the Earth's moon
Made of the same gas as the sun (hydrogen).
Distance from Sun is 1.4 billion km
Saturn is a gaseous giant planet named after the Roman god of the harvest.
Its thick atmosphere is mostly comprised of hydrogen and helium. It may also have a rocky core, not much bigger than Earth.
All four of the gas giant planets in our Solar System have rings, but Saturn’s rings are the biggest and brightest.
Saturn’s rings are comprised of countless particles of ice, along with a small amount of ice-covered rock.
Saturn’s rings are wide, but thin. You can see the rings through a small telescope. When we look at the rings edge-on, they almost disappear because they’re so thin. In this photograph, the rings appear as a thin dark line. You can also see Tethys - one of Saturn's many moons - in the photograph.
Saturn was the most distant of the five planets known to the ancient skywatchers.
In 1610, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was the first to gaze at Saturn through a telescope. Much to his surprise, he saw a pair of objects on either side of the planet. He sketched them as separate spheres and wrote that Saturn appeared to be a triple-bodied planet. In 1659, the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, using a more powerful telescope than Galileo's, proposed that Saturn was surrounded by a thin, flat ring.
Picture
In 1675, the Italian-born astronomer Jean-Dominique Cassini discovered a "division" between what are now called the A and B rings. It is now known that the gravitational influence of Saturn's moon Mimas is responsible for the Cassini Division, which is 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers) wide.
Like Jupiter, Saturn is made mostly of hydrogen and helium. Its volume is 755 times greater than that of Earth. Winds in the upper atmosphere reach 1,600 feet (500 meters) per second in the equatorial region. (In contrast, the strongest hurricane-force winds on Earth top out at about 360 feet, or 110 meters, per second.) These superfast winds, combined with heat rising from within the planet's interior, cause the yellow and gold bands visible in the atmosphere.
Saturn's ring system is the most extensive and complex in the solar system, extending hundreds of thousands of kilometers from the planet. In the early 1980s, NASA's two Voyager spacecraft revealed that Saturn's rings are made mostly of water ice. They also found "braided" rings, ringlets, and "spokes," dark features in the rings that circle the planet at different rates from that of the surrounding ring material. Material in the rings ranges in size from a few micrometers to several tens of meters. Two of Saturn's small moons orbit within gaps in the main rings.