Saturn

The beautiful ringed planet

Saturn is the most beautiful planet! It has giant rings around it. The rings are made of billions of pieces of ice and rock — some as small as a grain of sand, others as big as a house. Saturn is so light that if you dropped it into a giant pool, it would float!

Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second-largest gas giant. Its famous rings are mostly particles of water ice: 280,000 km wide but in places only 10 metres thick. Saturn's average density is less than water's (0.69 g/cm³) — the only planet like that. Saturn has more than 270 moons; Titan is bigger than Mercury and the only moon with a thick atmosphere, with lakes of methane on its surface. The moon Enceladus shoots fountains of water from an ocean under its ice. A strange hexagon-shaped storm swirls at Saturn's north pole.

Fun facts

• Saturn's rings are very wide but very thin — imagine a sheet of paper the size of a football field.
• Winds on Saturn blow at 1,800 km/h.
• There's a hexagon-shaped storm at Saturn's north pole — and no one fully understands why.
• Saturn's rings are slowly disappearing — in 100 million years they may be gone.