The Fascinating Beauty that is Saturn

Saturn is my favourite planet in the solar system by far! It's hard not to love it with the beautiful ring system that surrounds the planet and it's beautiful pale yellow colouring, but for me part of what I love about it is just how strange and fascinating the planet is! Seriously when I was reading up about what I wanted to share in this post it felt like I could go on forever just reading up about the different things about this planet.

Saturn during it's Equinox with it's largest moon Titan visible in the bottom left corner.

So to start, here are a couple nifty things about Saturn you may not have known about! Saturn is the 6th planet in the solar system and the second largest after Jupiter. It has an oval shape due to it's fast rotation causing the poles to collapse in giving it a larger equator region. It has the largest ring system in all of the solar system spanning from 7,000 KM above it's equatorial region to 80,000 km above it and is made mostly of ice and little bit of rock particles! Saturn has the second most moons behind Jupiter counting to around 63, some notable ones being Rhea, Encladius and the most famous Titan for being the only moon in the solar system to have a thick and dense atmosphere. Lastly, Saturn get's it's pale yellow hue from it having ammonia particles in it's upper atmosphere.

All that stuff above is fine and dandy, but here are some of the more fascinating parts about Saturn! For one, we actually don't know how long a day in Saturn really is and I will go into the various factor that attribute to this. Another is how it's North Pole is naturally formed  hexagon on it that is not present on it's southern pole. Lastly, it can have major storms that seemingly wrap around the entire plan, but only seem to crop up on rare instances.

So to start, why do we actually not know exactly how long a day on Saturn is? Well the main reason is the clouds move at a different speed then the actual planet's core does. Certain sections of Saturns cloud move and rotate around the planet at differing speeds due to the winds. Some moving more in line with what we estimate a rotation cycle is, while others may go faster or slower! That all said scientists then tried to go off the magnetosphere's rotation that was given by Voyagers passby in order to estimate how long the day was which was agreed upon as a good estimate on the rotation, until Cassini arrived. When Cassini arrived, it's measurements of how long it took the magnetosphere to rotate showed it was slower then Voyagers! It was later derrived that Encladius's geysers of water actually created a drag on the magnetosphere and slowed down it's rotation! That all said after measurements from 3 different space prodes the latest estimate that we still have for the length of a day on Saturn is around 10 hours 32 minutes and 35 seconds. With all that said it does help me lead into helping to explain why there is a hexagon on Saturn's north pole!

The hexagon on Saturn's north pole filmed by Cassini

So what's with this? Well after being stumped by it since Voyagers original reports of it there has been some explanations developed as to why this is, and it does relate back to the topic on the differing wind currents on the planet. One experiment done in a lab using water showed they were able to create something very similar when moving the water currents at differing speeds in the center and on the outside. That movement created 6 small vortexes outside of the large center one which gave it those almost corner like appearances. It's amazing to me how this is a naturally occurring phenomenon!

Speaking of naturally occurring phenomenon, the massive storms Saturn can have are another crazy natural occurrence on the planet, but don't occur often. In fact storms like the one shown below have only occurred 6 times in the last 160 years! So why is a storm that could easily cover our globe so rare when storms here happen all the time? Well the answer to that scientist believe has to do with what the planet is made of. You see the storms on Saturn are also composed of water like they are here, but because there is so much hydrogen and helium on Saturn it actually acts as a stopper to storms there. Why is that? Well here when water heats up and rises, it will eventually condense as it cools off and fall back down as rain. Now something similar does occur on Saturn, the water heats up and rises, but because it is much more heavier than hydrogen and helium it never rises high enough! So what actually causes it is when the upper atmosphere cools enough that it dips underneath that layer of water, but when it does so it does so at a impressively large rate creating these beautiful, frightening massive storms!

The Saturn super storm, this one wrapped completely around the planet.

Saturn is a fascinating planet of our solar system, and as we learn more about it, the more fascinating it becomes! I cannot wait to see what this planet shows us in the future as we continue to study it! However this is only one fascinating marvels of our solar system and as time goes I hope to share more of the wonders of our solar system to you!

I hope you all enjoyed it and please feel free to share with your friends and family and give this a like if you enjoyed it!

See you out there!