Saturn - The Ringed Planet
- Build a bathtub large enough to hold a planet. Now drop each of the planets into the bathtub, one by one. All of them will sink. Except Saturn. Saturn is the
least dense of all the planets, and would actually float in water - if you could build a bathtub that big!
- Saturn's rings are much more obvious than the rings of the other gas giants, for two reasons. First, they are much larger (about twice the size of the planet itself) and second, because
much of the rings are made up of ice and ice-covered rocks, which reflect the sun's rays nicely.
- One of Saturn's moons - Rhea, appears to have a system of rings itself! Reminds me of that verse in Ezekiel, which talks about "wheels within wheels!"
- Poor Galileo - when he first looked at Saturn, he couldn't figure out what he was looking at! Was it a stretched out planet? A planet with two moons on opposite sides? Of course,
it didn't help any that every 14 years, Saturn is positioned in such a way that its rings are almost invisible from the earth. No wonder Galileo couldn't figure it out; the planet seemed to change shape!
"The Solar System" is written by Douglas Twitchell, and hosted at The Problem Site.
Contents copyright 2009 by Douglas Twitchell. Contents of this page may not be reproduced without permission of the author. For information on using
this site in a classroom situation, please visit the Teachers page.
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