The Planets- Saturn 1

Saturn is the most distant of the five planets known to ancient stargazers. In 1610, Italian Galileo Galilee was the first astronomer to gaze at Saturn through a telescope. To his surprise, he saw a pair of objects on either side of the planet, which he later drew as "cup handles" attached to the planet on each side. In 1659, Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens announced that this was a ring encircling the planet.

In 1675, Italian-born astronomer Jean Dominique Cassini discovered a gap between what are now called the A and B rings.

Like Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune, Saturn is a gas giant. It is made mostly of hydrogen and helium. Its volume is 755 times greater than Earth's. Winds in the upper atmosphere reach 500 meters per second in the equatorial region. (In contrast, the strongest hurricane-force winds on Earth top out at about 110 meters per second.) These super-fast winds, combined with heat rising from within the planet's interior, cause the yellow and gold bands visible in its atmosphere. Saturn's ring system is the most extensive and complex in our solar system; it extends hundreds of thousands of kilometers from the planet. In fact, Saturn and its rings would just fit in the distance between Earth and the Moon.

Next- Planet Saturn part2