AY 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Giant Planet, Orbital Resonance, Rings Of Saturn
Document Summary
Saturn and its rings, uranus and neptune, moons of the outer solar system, the pluto system. Ball: a normal jovian planet with indistinct bands almost twice as far from sun as jupiter. Rings: thin disk made of millions of small fragments orbiting over equator: the prominent dark gap in the rings called the cassini division is a mostly empty zone detectable even in a small telescope. Saturn has a visibly non-spherical shape, its polar diameter is 10% less than its equatorial diameter. The cause of this non-spherical shape is the relatively low density of the planet in conjunction with its rapid rotation. Like jupiter, saturn has a dipole magnetic field. The rings of saturn are difficult to resolve into their millions of orbiting fragments, even in spacecraft views. This is because the fragments are very small. How big are the fragments and what are they made of: range from less than 1cm to 10 meters, made of 99% water ice.
