What is the average diameter of saturn

Adorned with thousands of beautiful ringlets, Saturn is unique among the planets. Like the other gas giants, Saturn is mostly a massive ball of hydrogen and helium. Saturn was the most distant of the five planets known to the ancients. In , Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was the first to gaze at Saturn through a telescope. To his surprise, he saw a pair of objects on either side of the planet.

He sketched them as separate spheres, thinking that Saturn was triple-bodied. Continuing his observations over the next few years, Galileo drew the lateral bodies as arms or handles attached to Saturn. In , Italian-born astronomer Jean-Dominique Cassini discovered a division between what are now called the A and B rings. Like Jupiter, Saturn is made mostly of hydrogen and helium.

Its volume is times greater than that of Earth. Winds in the upper atmosphere reach m 1, feet per second in the equatorial region. In contrast, the strongest hurricane-force winds on Earth top out at about m, or feet per second. Further study of this moon promises to reveal much about planetary formation and, perhaps, about the early days of Earth. Saturn also has many smaller icy satellites. On Earth, these charged particles come from the solar wind. The Cassini spacecraft, orbiting Saturn since , continues to explore the planet and its moons, rings and magnetosphere.

By July , Cassini had returned more than , images. But like all the other gas giants, this varies due to its rapid rotational period 16 hours, 6 minutes and 36 seconds and composition, and subsequent flattening at the poles 0. As a result, the planet experiences a variation of km In summary, the planets of our Solar System vary in diameter due to differences in their composition and the speed of their rotation. In short, terrestrial planets tend to be smaller than gas giants, and gas giants tend to spin faster than terrestrial worlds.

Between these two factors, the worlds we know range between near-perfect spheres and flattened spheres. We have written many articles about the Solar System here at Universe Today. For more information of the planets, here is a look at the eight planets and some fact sheets about the planets from NASA. Astronomy Cast has episodes on all the planets. Here is Mercury to start out with. Pluto has a diameter of 1, miles 2, kilometers across, as determined by New Horizons in July It is estimated to be 70 percent rock and 30 percent ice.

New Horizons has shown that Pluto is actually the most Earth-like planet in the solar system after Earth itself. No, its the current IAU designation. And the New Horizons probe showed that Pluto behaves as both a planet and a comet, at least where its interaction with solar wind is involved. The only other planet to behave this way is Mercury. You are not entitled to your own facts. The question is how small a KBO can be, and still retain an unfrozen ocean.

Who knew that KBOs would be like potentially habitable ice moons? But that is what you get when you classify objects in natural categories.

Pluto is definitely not an astronomical planet, nor a terrestrial planet. Satellite planets such as Europa, Titan, Enceladus, and small planets like Pluto and Ceres, all of which may harbor subsurface oceans, are likely the best bets for finding microbial life in the solar system beyond Earth. The five rings are composed primarily of chunks of water-ice, mixed with pieces of rocks. They average a thickness of 66 feet 20 meters.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community space. Nola Taylor Tillman is a contributing writer for Space. She loves all things space and astronomy-related, and enjoys the opportunity to learn more. In her free time, she homeschools her four children. Follow her on Twitter at NolaTRedd.