What makes saturn a planet

Saturn Share Tweet Email. Why it's so hard to treat pain in infants. This wild African cat has adapted to life in a big city. Animals Wild Cities This wild African cat has adapted to life in a big city Caracals have learned to hunt around the urban edges of Cape Town, though the predator faces many threats, such as getting hit by cars. India bets its energy future on solar—in ways both small and big.

Environment Planet Possible India bets its energy future on solar—in ways both small and big Grassroots efforts are bringing solar panels to rural villages without electricity, while massive solar arrays are being built across the country.

Go Further. Animals Climate change is shrinking many Amazonian birds. Animals Wild Cities This wild African cat has adapted to life in a big city. Animals This frog mysteriously re-evolved a full set of teeth. Animals Wild Cities Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London. Animals Wild Cities Morocco has 3 million stray dogs.

Meet the people trying to help. Environment COP26 nears conclusion with mixed signals and frustration. Environment Planet Possible India bets its energy future on solar—in ways both small and big. Environment As the EU targets emissions cuts, this country has a coal problem. Paid Content How Hong Kong protects its sea sanctuaries. History Magazine These 3,year-old giants watched over the cemeteries of Sardinia.

Science Coronavirus Coverage What families can do now that kids are getting the vaccine. Magazine How one image captures 21 hours of a volcanic eruption. Science Why it's so hard to treat pain in infants.

Mimas boasts a massive crater that makes it eerily similar to the Death Star from Star Wars. It too may have a subsurface ocean, though material from the ocean does not appear to leak up to the surface.

Dione and Rhea are cratered snowball worlds with rocky cores. Hyperion looks like a giant sponge or coral reef. Iapetus is two-faced, with an icy half and a dark half coated with material coming from the comet-like moon Phoebe. One of the most revolutionary space missions of all time, Cassini spent 13 Earth years—almost half a Saturn year—watching how the planet and its moons changed with the seasons as they orbited the Sun.

Cassini also observed a planet-wide megastorm that appears roughly every Saturn year—30 Earth years. Gravity measurements by Cassini and radio measurements by Huygens showed that Titan likely harbors a large subsurface ocean of water. Cassini also directly imaged Enceladus spewing water from its subsurface ocean into space.

In these close encounters, Cassini measured the mass of the rings based on how the spacecraft was gently tugged towards them, and found them to weigh less than even the small moon Mimas, which is just kilometers miles wide. Combined with the fact that the rings are bright, undarkened by constant space weathering, this hints that they are less than million years old —very young in geological terms.

Descendants of the voyaging Polynesians, the Maori were skilled readers of the sky. He thought Saturn had two small planets or moons poking out from it sides. Several years later, he would again fix his gaze on Saturn, and to his astonishment he found the two neighbors had vanished. But the rings are razor thin, measuring only three hundred feet high. Galileo would later suggest that Saturn had retracting arms, or ears, or cup handles. He would die without knowing the truth. Some of his early sketches of the planet resemble an eye staring back from the void:.

Some planetary scientists think they formed at the same time as Saturn. In 20 million years or so, Mars will likely shred one of its moons into a ring. To investigate this mystery and many others, NASA has slung four space probes out to Saturn, beginning with Pioneer 11, which left Earth in , with Saturn as its final planetary destination. No lander will ever be sent to Saturn. Any probe sent to the gas giant would plunge past the lightsaber-blue auroras in its outer atmosphere, and down into opaque layers of gas, before crumpling under the mounting pressure.

There are quite a few targets to choose from. Beneath the icy outer shell of Enceladus, the most beautiful moon in the solar system, an ocean that may support life sloshes. And unlike Mercury—or Mars for that matter—Titan has its own atmosphere, which is home to some of the richest, most complex chemistry in the solar system.

The most complex known chemistry exists inside living organisms.