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Saturn

 

Due to Saturn's light weight and fast rotation it causes it to spread out, or oblate, its center, when viewed through a small telescope, looks visibly flattened. Its equatorial and polar diameters vary by almost 10% (120,536 km vs. 108,728 km); the other gas planets also oblate, but not as much as Saturn does. Also because of its fast rotation it is concluded that the winds of Saturn's equator go as fast as 1060 mph.
             Saturn being the second largest planet, as Jupiter is the first, is around seventy-two thousand miles in diameter at its equator (120,536 km), almost ten times the size of Earth. Its volume would take up about 769 Earth size bodies. In spite of its large size, Saturn weighs very little. It is the least dense planet in the Solar System, so light that it could float in water, and its specific gravity (0.7) is less than that of water. It is eight times less than Earth's density because the planet consists mostly of gas hydrogen. The Giant or Gas planets do not have the same layered structure that the terrestrial planets do, they have less solid material. Saturn consist of around 75% hydrogen and 25% helium, like the planet Jupiter but much less dense, and also has methane, ammonia, ethane, acetylene .
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             and phosphine, and with traces of various ices. Its interior may also consist of a small rocky core similar to the composition of the primordial Solar Nebula from which the solar system was formed. .
             Since Saturn is a gas planet it does not have a solid surface where a spacecraft could land. Images that have been sent back show whirl winds and clouds in a deep haze. The clouds that are seen when looking at Saturn are just the top layer of a very deep layer that covers the center of liquid hydrogen. The different color gases produce belts of streak-like swirls surrounding the planet. The swirls are a series of storms on the planet's surface.


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