43 Fun Facts About Saturn

Where does Saturn rank in distance from the Sun?

Sixth. Saturn is also the farthest planet that people found without a telescope, so for most of history it marked the edge of the known Solar System.

Saturn is the only planet in the Solar System with which property?

Less dense than water. Saturn's average density is about 70% of water's, so in a big enough bathtub the giant planet would float.

Saturn's rings are made mainly of what?

Water ice. The pieces range from dust-sized grains to chunks as big as a house, and may be the wreckage of comets, asteroids or moons torn apart by Saturn's gravity.

Who first realised the bulges beside Saturn were a ring?

Christiaan Huygens. The Dutchman, who also invented the pendulum clock, found a better way to grind lenses, and his improved telescope also showed him Saturn's largest moon.

Which astronomer first saw Saturn's rings, in 1610, but took them for two moons hugging the planet?

Galileo Galilei. His telescope was too weak to show a ring, and when the 'moons' vanished two years later he wondered whether Saturn had swallowed his children.

Saturn's rings carry letters such as A, B and C, assigned in order of what?

Their discovery. That is why the letters look scrambled as you move outward from the planet: D, C, B, A, F, G and finally E.

Saturn has seasons, as Earth does, because it shares which feature with our planet?

A tilted axis. Saturn leans about 27 degrees, close to Earth's 23.5, but its year is so long that each season lasts more than seven Earth years.

What geometric shape surrounds Saturn's north pole in a persistent cloud pattern?

A hexagon. It traces a wavy jet stream, and physicists have made the same six-sided pattern in the lab by rotating the centre of a tank of fluid at a different speed from its rim.

Saturn's winds are the second fastest of any planet, behind those of which world?

Neptune. Its winds top 2,000 km/h even though it receives far less of the Sun's energy than Saturn, where gusts reach about 1,800 km/h.

Which unusual process may help explain why Saturn gives off about twice the energy it receives from the Sun?

Helium rain deep inside. Droplets of helium sink toward the core, and friction turns the energy of their fall into heat.

The highest clouds on Saturn are made of frozen crystals of which compound?

Ammonia. The cloud tops are cold enough, well below −100 °C, to freeze it into crystals, which fade away again in the warmer air beneath.

Mountains on Saturn's largest moon, such as Erebor Mons, are named after peaks in which fictional world?

Middle-earth. Under the astronomers' naming rules each kind of feature there has a theme, so another peak is Doom Mons and the hills honour characters such as Bilbo and Gandalf.

Saturn's largest moon is unique among moons for having what?

A dense atmosphere. Its haze is so thick that when Voyager 1 flew close by in 1980, its cameras could not see the surface at all.

The lakes and seas on the surface of Saturn's largest moon are filled with what?

Liquid methane and ethane. At about −179 °C these natural gases rain from the sky and carve river channels, much as water does on Earth.

Which small icy moon of Saturn shoots geysers of water from its south pole?

Enceladus. The jets spray a hidden saltwater ocean out into space, and the icy dust they leave behind forms one of Saturn's rings.

Saturn's small outer moons fall into three groups named from Inuit, Gallic and which other mythology?

Norse. Moons of the Norse group circle Saturn backwards, against the planet's rotation, a clue that they were captured by its gravity and did not form alongside it.

Which moon of Saturn has a giant crater that makes it look like the Death Star from Star Wars?

Mimas. The crater, named Herschel after the moon's discoverer, spans a third of its width, and the likeness is pure chance: the film came out before any probe had seen it.

Which moon of Saturn has one hemisphere as dark as coal and the other many times brighter?

Iapetus. Its discoverer noticed in 1671 that he could see the moon on only one side of Saturn, and rightly guessed that one face was far darker than the other.

Small moons such as Pandora and Prometheus are called 'shepherds' because they do what?

Keep ring material from spreading. Their gravity nudges straying particles back into line, the way sheepdogs work the edges of a flock, which keeps some rings narrow.

Why do Saturn's rings seem to vanish from view about once every 15 years?

Earth sees them edge-on. The rings are so thin for their width that side-on they all but disappear, as they did in 2009 and again in March 2025.

A year before Voyager 1 arrived, which spacecraft made the very first flyby of Saturn?

Pioneer 11. It skimmed about 21,000 km above the cloud tops and found a thin new ring, though its pictures were too coarse to show detail on the moons.

Cassini–Huygens was a joint mission of NASA, the Italian Space Agency and which other partner?

The European Space Agency. One of its engineers rescued the probe it built: his test in 2000 showed the orbiter could not read the probe's signal, so the flight path was redrawn before release.

The Huygens probe, released by Cassini, landed on which moon in January 2005?

Titan. The probe took about two and a half hours to reach the ground, then went on sending data from the surface for some 90 minutes.

How did the Cassini mission end in September 2017?

It plunged into Saturn's atmosphere, and on purpose: burning the craft up at the end of its working life ruled out any crash that might contaminate moons where life could exist.

What type of craft is NASA's Dragonfly mission to Saturn's largest moon?

A rotorcraft (drone) lander. Flying lets it hop for miles between sites instead of staying where it first touches down, to study the kind of chemistry that came before life on Earth.

What are Saturn's giant storms, seen about once a Saturnian year, called?

Great White Spots. They usually erupt around northern midsummer, about three decades apart, but the 2010 storm arrived early, in spring, only 20 years after the last.

Saturn is named after the Roman god of what?

Wealth and agriculture. Fittingly, his temple in the Roman Forum served as the treasury of the Roman state.

In the film Interstellar, what has mysteriously appeared near Saturn?

A wormhole. The film grew out of a treatment co-written by physicist Kip Thorne, who wanted a story built on the real science he had studied, wormholes above all.

Which Greek god did the Romans equate with Saturn, a name the planet still carries in modern Greek?

Cronus. In the best-known telling he swallowed each of his children at birth to stop them overthrowing him, until the youngest, Zeus, was hidden away and grew up to do just that.

Which metal did medieval alchemists pair with slow, distant Saturn?

Lead. The link survives in 'saturnism', an old name for lead poisoning, and in 'saturnine' for a heavy, gloomy temperament.

Which Spanish artist painted 'Saturn Devouring His Son' straight onto a wall of his own house?

Francisco Goya. It was one of fourteen 'Black Paintings' he made as murals for himself; after his death they were cut from the walls, moved to canvas and taken to the Prado.

In Hindu astrology, Saturn is known by what name, as a judge of everyone's good and bad deeds?

Shani. He is one of the nine Navagrahas of Hindu astrology, and stories say a curse brings hardship on anyone his gaze falls upon.

In traditional Chinese and Japanese astronomy, Saturn is the star of which of the Five Elements?

Earth (soil). The old scheme survives in everyday language: the modern Chinese and Japanese names for Saturn still mean 'soil star'.

The Roman festival of Saturnalia was held in which month?

December. It began on the 17th and grew into a week of feasting and gift-giving in which masters waited on their slaves; some of its customs may have fed into Christmas.

The reign of Saturn was remembered by the Romans as what kind of age?

A Golden Age. Poets such as Hesiod and Ovid pictured people living off the earth's bounty without toil, and his yearly festival acted that world out by having masters wait on their slaves.

Ancient writers read the myth of Saturn devouring his own children as an allegory for what?

The passage of time. As Cicero put it, time devours the years that are past, and by the Renaissance the god had turned into Father Time with his scythe.

Saturn's rings look brightest and best from Earth when the planet is at what configuration?

Opposition. Saturn then sits opposite the Sun and at its nearest to us, so it rises at sunset and stays up all night; the event comes round about two weeks later each year.

Beyond the main rings lies a sparse ring, tilted 27° and orbiting backwards, named after which moon?

Phoebe. The ring is dust knocked off that moon by impacts, and it is so vast and faint that it went unnoticed until an infrared space telescope picked it up in 2009.

Which planet, found in 1781, lies next beyond Saturn, the farthest world easily seen with the naked eye?

Uranus. William Herschel first took it for a comet, and because it lies about twice as far from the Sun as Saturn, finding it doubled the size of the known Solar System.

Which gas makes up about 96% of Saturn's outer atmosphere by volume?

Hydrogen gas. Deeper down the pressure squeezes it into a liquid and then into a metal, and electric currents in that layer are thought to drive Saturn's magnetic field.

In Holst's orchestral suite The Planets, Saturn is called 'the Bringer of' what?

Old Age. Holst took the planets' characters from astrology, a hobby that had him casting friends' horoscopes, so his Saturn is about ageing, not rings.

Which writer's 1752 novel Micromégas is among the earliest works of fiction to feature Saturn?

Voltaire. His giant traveller from the star Sirius stops off on Saturn and befriends a local 'dwarf', who stands a mere two kilometres tall.

Which sponge-like moon of Saturn tumbles chaotically instead of keeping one face turned to the planet?

Hyperion. Scientists think it is so light and porous that impacts punch deep pits instead of blasting material away, which gives it the look of a sponge.