Saturn is the fanciest planet thanks to its prominent rings, cocked jauntily to the side. But this showy gem of the solar system has a lot of substance in addition to a great sense of style. Learn what makes Saturn so interesting in this episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What are the key features of Saturn?
Yeah. And not just stuff in general. We're actually going to zero in on one specific piece of stuff that's out there in space, a little planet called Saturn.
That's right. The ringed beauty, as they like to say in the biz.
It is, yeah. That's what the astrophysicists all call it. Yeah, Saturn does have rings. It's not the only planet with rings, as we'll see. Or we can see now, I think Jupiter and Uranus and is it Mercury also that has rings? But they're just, they don't hold a candle to Saturn's rings.
Hey, get that candle away from my anus.
Saturn's also a really ancient planet in that as far as human experience goes, for as long as we've been looking up in the night sky, we've seen Saturn. Because it is the sixth planet from the sun, it's also the furthest planet away that you can see with the naked eye here on planet Earth.
want to know something funny before we go any further yeah always uh before we recorded emily was asking um as she sometimes does what we're recording and i told her the two episodes and she asked about saturn and i was like not very interesting to me she said so what are you gonna what do you do in those episodes just like do commentary and make jokes i went well there's probably not gonna be a lot of jokes
And she said, well, as long as you can make one about Uranus. And I said, I don't think I'll be able to because it's about Saturn. And lo and behold, a minute and 20 in. Yeah.
Wow. Now you have two more times to bring it back and then you'll have completed the comedy.
I think that's a one or as they say, but I'm just excited to report back to Emily that that happened unexpectedly and delight delightedly.
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Chapter 2: How does Saturn compare to Earth?
It makes it look like a nickel if Saturn was a volleyball. NASA loves that one. If you ever look up Saturn's size, NASA uses that every chance they get.
I wonder if when they got the nickel part and they were like, all right, well, we got to find something laying around here that's as big as this distance. And some guy was like, you know, there was one sporty guy in the corner, like, practicing setting a volleyball spike. Mm-hmm. He said, what about Jim over there?
Is that low-hanging fruit Phil who is about to do that?
Oh, man, poor Phil. But, you know, you're right. Nickel compared to a volleyball is pretty good. But let's talk equator. The equator is close to 10 times larger than Earth at 227 miles around compared to Earth's piddly little 25,000 miles.
Yeah, it's got an extra spare tire compared to Earth's, you know?
Totally.
One of the things about Saturn, though, if you aren't like an astronomy type, the kind of planet that Saturn is is a gas giant, which means that it's made largely of gas. Or gas is. So to be a gas giant, you don't have to just be a big ball of gas, but you're made of things that typically are considered gases on the periodic table. Let's just get that straight right out of the gate, okay? Right.
But if you put the whole thing together, Saturn doesn't have a surface to speak of. If you did go far enough in toward the center- You might eventually hit something you could stand on, but you would be under so much heat and pressure that you wouldn't be thinking about standing on the surface anymore. You'd have other problems.
Yeah. It's a very not dense planet. And some say it could even float in water if there was water that large. A pool? Yeah. Or, I don't know, a pond?
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Chapter 3: What is Saturn's atmosphere like?
You know, I don't know the difference between a pond and a lake.
In Maine, there is no difference.
I would think a pond is human-made, but there are many human-made lakes, too. So, I don't know. I'll have to look that up.
I always assumed it was size. Like, pond is smaller. Lake is larger. Well. That's how you remember. Lake, L, large, L. And pond, puny. Nice one.
I mean, that seems obvious, but surely there's something else. But maybe not. We'll look into that. More to come on ponds and links.
Okay. I'll keep talking while you look.
I was going to talk. So why don't you look it up? Earth is the third planet out, as Modest Mouse will tell you. They're about 92 million miles away, or we are rather. Saturn is the sixth planet away from the sun. And things really pick up after you get away from Earth. 886 million miles away. which is going to mean they're going to be a very cold planet because they get not nearly as much sun.
They get about 1.2 percent of the sunlight that we get, which means the average temperature in the upper atmosphere of Saturn is a very chilly negative 220 degrees Fahrenheit.
Or negative 140 Celsius for our non-American Liberian or I can't remember the third one, friends. That's right. So there's some other interesting things that happen because it gets such little sunlight. But one of the things that astronomers were surprised by at first was Saturn's atmosphere.
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Chapter 4: How did Saturn form?
We're talking 500 mile an hour winds at the center of this vortex. And they think that weird shape is due to the really fast rotation, which makes a bulge at the equator and flattens things out at the pole. So it's just created this really strange kind of jet stream, this strange shape.
Yeah. So I think, Chuck, we can't really put it off any longer. I believe that it's time to talk about Saturn's rings. Because, I mean, imagine if we didn't in this episode.
Yeah, I mean, you mentioned, you know, it's not the only one with rings. I know you mentioned my anus. Sorry. That's three. I know. That's the lowest of low-hanging fruit, though. Phil would be like, it's fine. Yeah, Bill would love it. But Neptune and Jupiter, I'm not sure if you mentioned those. Those are some other ringed planets. But Saturn's are like those are the showstoppers.
They're incredible. If you've ever, you know, do yourself a favor. If you've never looked at like real pictures, like telescopic pictures of Saturn, like do so because it's incredible looking. These pictures.
I have I have an anecdote about that. Let's hear it. So remember, we did an Australian tour a few years back. It was great. Yeah, it was. On one of the days off, Yumi and I went to the Sydney Observatory one night. Oh, cool. And they just happened to have one of their telescopes trained on Saturn. And you could lean over and look through the eyepiece. And we did.
And both of us just started laughing because it looked amazing. So fake, like a little white cutout of Saturn, just flat as could be. It just looked like they were like, we can't find Saturn. So we're going to have to put this slide in there. But the volunteer was looking at us like, what are you what's so funny about Saturn? Basically, we just moved along.
But that was our that's my Saturn anecdote.
And you said it looked fake. And he's like, that's real, man.
No, we didn't. We didn't bother to say anything. It was mine and Yumi's little joke.
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Chapter 5: What are Saturn's rings made of?
Chapter 6: What interesting weather phenomena occur on Saturn?
Chapter 7: How does Saturn's rotation affect its shape?
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All right. So there are a couple of theories about how Saturn was formed. If you're a regular human walking around planet Earth, you might hear both of these and say, sounds like you're kind of talking about basically the same thing. Yeah. If you're an astrophysicist, you might glaven out, as you mentioned before. That's two glavens. And say, oh, no, no, no.
It is a very polarizing question in astrophysics and to us. This difference is very large. So, yeah. So if you're an astrophysicist out there, this might really excite you. If you're not, I would I would dare you. I would urge you to try and be delighted in the minutia of the difference of science and how important that can be.
The question about how Saturn or gas giants like Saturn form is more polarizing than the proposal to rename Uranus.
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