despair that Saturn must have swallowed his children, according to
the legend. He finally became so exasperated with the results of his
observations that he gave up observing the planet. The true nature of
these appendages of Saturn remained a mystery until Huygens solved
the problem in 1655, some time after the death of Galileo.
In addition to the rings, Saturn has nine satellites named, in the
order of their distance outward from the planet, Mimas, Enceladus,
Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, Hyperion, Iapetus and Phoebe. The
last-mentioned satellite was discovered by W. H. Pickering in 1899.
It aroused great interest at the time because it was the first
satellite to be discovered with "retrograde" motion in its orbit. Two
satellites of Jupiter since discovered revolve in the same direction
around their primary.
The satellites of Saturn are approximate to those of Jupiter in
size and exactly equal them in number. The largest, Titan, is three
thousand miles in diameter and can be easily seen with the smallest
telescopes. With a four-inch telescope five of the satellites can
be readily found, though they are not as interesting to observe as
the satellites of Jupiter because they are far more distant from
the earth. The time they require to make one journey around Saturn
varies from nearly twenty-three hours for Mimas, the nearest, to
approximately five hundred and twenty-four days for Phoebe, the most
distant.
Saturn as well as Jupiter is marked by belts parallel to the Equator
though they appear more indistinct than those of Jupiter on account
of the greater distance of Saturn. Saturn also resembles Jupiter
in its physical composition which is largely, if not entirely,
gaseous, and in the extremely short period of rotation on its axis
which is approximately ten hours. In more ways than one Saturn is
a very unusual planet. In addition to possessing an enormous ring
system it is the lightest of all the planets, its density being only
sixty-three hundredths that of water, and it is the most oblate,
its flattening at the poles amounting nearly to one-tenth of its
diameter. Its equator is more highly inclined to its orbit than is
the case with any other planet, not even excepting the earth and
Mars. For this reason its seasonal changes are very great, in marked
contrast to Jupiter whose equator lies very nearly in the plane of
its orbit. Since Saturn is so far away from the sun that it receives
only one ninetieth as much light and heat per unit area as the earth,
its outer gaseous surface must be extremely cold unless considerable
heat is conveyed to the surface from within its hot interior.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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