Francesco BorgoEye on The Sky Inquiry Project

For the Eye on The Sky Inquiry Project, my question is:Why does Saturn have his rings?

So I would like to present you all the information I discovered about Saturn and his rings.

Saturn is one of the nine planets that belong to our Solar System.

The Solar SystemThe planets have different dimension and they rotate around the sun with different speed.

Four are solid, they are made of rocks. Among these solid planets there is also our Earth.

The other five planets are bigger but they are not solid, they are enormous balls made of gas. (So you can’t walk on it!)

One of these big, external, gas planets is Saturn.

Saturn is the second largest planet in our Solar System (after Jupiter).

It is the fifth planet from the Sun and it’s made of gas.

It’s so light that if you could pose it on the water it would float!

But the thing that makes Saturn so special is the group of rings that surround it.

Do you know which material are they made of?

Some news about Saturn

Saturn’s rings are not solid rings, but are made of countless small particles, some of them very small, like few millimeters, some bigger, like some meters, that orbit together around the planet.

The rings’ particles are made almost entirely of water ice, with a small component of rocky material.

The ice reflects sun rays, that’s why Saturn is very bright in the night sky.

Saturn’s rings are made of…

This is an image, made by an artist, that shows the icy particles that form the apparently solid Saturn’s rings.

So they are like this

The rings are not visible from Earth using just our eyes.

So, the very first man who observed Saturn’s rings was the famous Italian (like me) astronomer Galileo Galilei,when in 1610 he invented the telescope and for the first time he used it to have a view on the sky.

Who discovered Saturn’s rings

In 1675, Giovanni Domenico Cassini, another famous Italian astronomer, studied Saturn.

He understood that Saturn’s ring was composed of multiple smaller rings with gaps between them.

The largest of these gaps was later named, in his name, the Cassini Division.It is wide 4.800 km !

Other info about Saturn’s rings

That’s how Saturn’s rings look like:

There are two main theories regarding the origin of Saturn's inner rings.

First theory: the rings were once a moon of Saturn whose orbit decayed until it came so close to the planet to be ripped apart in thousands of pieces.A variation of this theory is that the moon was disintegrated by the impact with a large comet or asteroid.

Second theory: the rings were never part of a moon but are instead some material left over from the original nebular material from which Saturn was formed. So Saturn's rings may be very old, dating to the formation of Saturn itself.

But what is the origin of the rings?

A lot of new information and very beautiful images of Saturn’s rings (like this one) are coming from the NASA Mission called Cassini–Huygens.

Cassini is a robotic spacecraft launched in 1997 and arrived in Saturn system in 2004.

Do you remember Cassini?

This is Cassini probe on Saturn

Cassini is the fourth space probe to visit Saturn and the first to enter orbit.Sixteen European countries (included ITALY) and the United States cooperate to design, built, fly and collect data from Cassini.

Let’s try to see if this link works

For pictures and information I used :www.nasa.govwww.wikipedia.com

http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/cassini_equinox/cassini_equinox_slideshow.html

Greetings

Thank you for your attention.

Bye from Saturn and from me!