The Planet Saturn

The Planet Saturn

The planet Saturn is very big. It is made mostly of gas, but if you could compress it to the density of water, it would be bigger than the Earth.
The clouds in its atmosphere are made of crystals of ice, and they make the rings of Saturn look like a giant snowflake. A single ring would be a half-mile wide if you could lay it out flat. And yet, though Saturn is more than 10 times wider than Jupiter, and though Jupiter itself is the biggest of the four gas giants, we do not call Jupiter a planet; we call it a “gas giant.”
From space, the only visible feature on Saturn is its rings. We know that there are moons orbiting Saturn (some big enough to hold onto an atmosphere) and that there is at least one other ring there (they are hard to see from Earth). We can guess that there may be more moons and rings we don’t know about. But we can’t see them because they aren’t bright enough to stand out against Saturn’s glare.
If you were transported to Saturn and looked up at the sky on a moonless night, there would be nothing to tell you that you were on a planet instead of just floating in empty space: no stars overhead, no horizon

Saturn is a planet that has a complicated structure and a lot of things that we do not yet understand. One of these is the hexagon, which you can see from here on earth as a simple six-sided figure. The thing is so striking that scientists have been wondering for decades why it exists, and how it exists.

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