saturn

Saturn was discovered in 1610 by Galileo Galilei. At first he saw the rings and thought Saturn was three planets. In 1659 Christiaan Huygens, a Dutchman, looked through a stronger telescope and said it had a flat ring around it, then in 1675 Jean-Dominique Cassini saw the gap between the two flat rings.

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 500 meters per second in the equator area. In contrast, the strongest hurricane-force winds on Earth top out at about 110 meters per second. These super-fast winds, combined with heat rising from within the planet's interior, cause the yellow and gold bands visible in the atmosphere.

In the 1980s NASA's two Voyager spacecraft revealed that Saturn's rings are made mostly of ice, and that Saturn's ring system extends hundreds of thousands of kilometers from the planet, yet height is about 10 meters (30 feet) in the main rings.

At Saturn's center is a dense core of rock, ice, water, and other compounds made solid by the intense pressure and heat. It is covered by liquid metallic hydrogen, inside a layer of liquid hydrogen - similar to Jupiter but much smaller. Saturn's magnetic field is smaller than Jupiter's but still 578 times as powerful as Earth’s.

Saturn is named for the Roman god of agriculture. The Greek equivalent was Cronos, father of Zeus/Jupiter. Other civilizations have given different names to Saturn, which is the farthest planet from Earth that can be observed by the unaided human eye.