As the material of the rings of Saturn must be in orbit, or else it would just fall into the planet, they clearly must rotate. However, not all at the same speed as if they were solid discs of course. The outer parts of the ring are moving slower than the inner parts.
While Saturn rotates on its axis once every ten hours, the inner edge of Saturn’s rings (the C ring) orbit around it a little under once every six hours, and the outer edge of its visible rings (the A ring) orbit around it a little over once every fourteen hours.
Ring-a-Round the Saturn. Saturn is the sixth planet from the sun. Credits: NASA. This close-up view of Saturn's rings shows that many tiny rings make up the larger rings around the planet.
Saturn is a funny-looking planet. True, it's not the only planet with rings. Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune have rings, too. But Saturn's rings are the biggest and brightest. An astronomer named Galileo was the first person to see Saturn's rings.
Saturn rotates about once every 10.5 hours. The planet's high-speed spin causes Saturn to bulge at its equator and flatten at its poles. The planet is around 75,000 miles (120,000 kilometers) across at its equator, and 68,000 miles (109,000 km) from pole to pole.
Saturn's seven icy rings each spin at their own speed, behaving like a "mini solar system." Planetary scientist James O'Donoghue made a beautifully simple animation to show how it works. But the rings are temporary: Saturn is slowly swallowing them, according to O'Donoghue's research.
The planet spins more than twice as fast as Earth does, completing a rotation every 10 hours. As Saturn rotates, so do its rings. But the ring material is so evenly spread out along each ring that in this movie one cannot see the rings rotating around Saturn.
Since Saturn spins about its axis with a period of 10.6562 hours, the inner parts of the main rings orbit at a faster speed than the planet rotates, and the outer parts at a slower speed.
Every planet in our solar system except for Venus and Uranus rotates counter-clockwise as seen from above the North Pole; that is to say, from west to east.
Right now, for example, the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn are moving backwards — a motion known as retrograde. That doesn't mean the planets have reversed direction, though. Instead, it's caused by Earth's motion relative to the two planets. Earth is closer to the Sun, so it moves faster in its orbit.
0d 10h 34mSaturn / Length of day
While they look like giant discs, they're not a solid track at all. Instead, they're made of millions of chunks of ice, some as tiny as dust particles, others as large as buses. But if you were able to hike on one of Saturn's outermost rings, you'll walk about 12 million kilometers to make it around the longest one.
The Rings of Saturn is narrated by an anonymous first-person narrator.
The title The Rings of Saturn comes from one of the novel's epigraphs, or opening quotations.
The rings do not sit still. They circle around Saturn at very high speeds. A closer look shows that each large ring is made up of many small rings. The small rings are sometimes called ringlets.
From far away, Saturn looks like it has seven large rings. Each large ring is named for a letter of the alphabet. The rings were named in the order they were discovered. The first ring discovered was named the A ring, but it is not the ring closest to or farthest from Saturn. Some of the rings are close together.
Ring-a-Round the Saturn. Saturn is the sixth planet from the sun. Credits: NASA. This close-up view of Saturn' s rings shows that many tiny rings make up the larger rings around the planet. Credits: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute. This article is part of the NASA Knows!
On the other hand, the rings are quite thin. They are only about 30 to 300 feet thick. Cassini is the latest NASA spacecraft to explore Saturn.
One thing we know for sure. Saturn's rings are made of ice and rock. These pieces vary in size. Some are as small as a grain of sand. Others are as large as a house. But scientists aren't sure when or how Saturn's rings formed. They think the rings might have something to do with Saturn's many moons.
Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune have rings, too. But Saturn's rings are the biggest and brightest. An astronomer named Galileo was the first person to see Saturn's rings. He spotted them while looking into space through a telescope in 1610.
Cassini is the latest NASA spacecraft to explore Saturn. Cassini left Earth in 1997 and arrived at Saturn seven years later, in 2004. The spacecraft has been orbiting the planet since then. Cassini sends new pictures and information back to Earth all the time.
The D ring is very faint and closest to Saturn. The main rings are A, B and C. The outermost ring, easily seen with Earth-based telescopes, is the A ring. The Cassini Division is the largest gap in the rings and separates the B ring from the A ring.
The particles in Saturn's rings are composed primarily of water ice and range in size from microns to tens of meters. The rings show a tremendous amount of structure on all scales; some of this structure is related to gravitational interactions with Saturn's many moons, but much of it remains unexplained.
They may have formed from the breakup of one of Saturn's moons or from a comet or meteor that was torn apart by Saturn's gravity. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.
Beyond that are two much fainter rings named G and E. Saturn's diffuse E ring is the largest planetary ring in our solar system, extending from Mimas' orbit to Titan's orbit, about 1 million kilometers (621,370 miles).
The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov .
Moderna has announced that their vaccine is effective against the new variants but said "pseudovirus neutralizing antibody titers were approximately 6-fold lower relative to prior variants" in regards to the SA Variant. What are the implications of this?
I can't tell if the expansion of the material will cause the material to expand inward thereby reducing the inner diameter or expand outward thereby increasing it.
How do we know its really hot when no one has been to the core of the Earth? I get that there is magma and all, but where is the gaurantee that it's from the core? It could very well be from the mid layer
My understanding is that combustion cars have brakes that turn the car's kinetic energy into heat energy, and electric cars have both these conventional brakes and can also do regenerative braking that turns some of the car's kinetic energy into electricity instead of heat.
I’m thinking about how mass affects range in electric vehicles. While energy spent during city driving that includes starting and stopping obviously is affected by mass (as braking doesn’t give 100% back), keeping a constant speed on a highway should be possible to split into different forms of friction. Driving in e.g.