Planetary Ring Systems - History, Structure Of The Rings
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A peek at Saturn through a small telescope reveals the solar system's jewelry, a breathtaking system of rings. These rings consist of a large number of individual particles orbiting Saturn. The diameter of Saturn's ring system is about 167,670 mi (270,000 km), a little less than the distance between the earth and the Moon. Yet the rings are only a few hundred meters thick. Saturn has the only ring system that we can see directly from the earth. Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune, do however all have ring systems. So rings do seem to be a common feature of giant gas planets.
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Galileo almost discovered Saturn's rings in 1610. His new telescope revealed something on either side of the planet. Galileo's drawings almost look as if Saturn had grown a pair of giant ears. Galileo was seeing, but not quite resolving, Saturn's rings. In 1655 Christian Huygens correctly described Galileo's appendages as a flat system of coplanar rings that were not at…
Prior to the Voyager mission, astronomers thought that Saturn had at most six different rings, labeled A through F. Voyager photographs show an amazing amount of unexpected detail in Saturn's rings. There are hundreds of individual ringlets in the 43,470 mi (70,000 km) wide main rings. The smallest may be as small as the 1.2 mi (2 km) width that the Voyager camera was able to resolve. (An e…
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