Saturn's Satellites

Saturn is the sixth in location from the Sun and the second largest (after Jupiter) planet of the solar system. He is also called the gas giant, and he received his name in honor of the Roman god of agriculture.

When asked how many satellites Saturn has, it is difficult to give an exact answer. Until 1997, only 18 of them were known to astronomers. At present, with the advent of the newest powerful telescopes, it has been possible to count them much more. Saturn's natural satellites are represented by a decent amount (62 pieces - with a confirmed orbit). 53 of them have their own names. Most of them consist of ice, rocks and is small in size. This explains their main feature - the high ability to reflect sunlight. In larger satellites, a rocky core is formed. Most of them (except for Phoebe and Hyperion) are constantly turned to the planet by only one side.

Saturn's satellites are regular and irregular. The first number 24, and the second - 38. The movement of regular satellites occurs almost in circular orbits, located near the equatorial plane of the planet. They rotate exclusively in the direction of Saturn's rotation. This indicates that Saturn's regular satellites formed in a gas-dust cloud that surrounded the planet during its inception.

Non-regular representatives include planets, a movement that differs from universal rules. They may have a more elongated orbit or eccentricity, movement in the opposite direction in the orbit, or a greater inclination to the equatorial plane. Irregular satellites of Saturn according to the characteristics of their orbits are classified into 3 groups:

• Galician;
• The Inuit;
• And Norwegian.

They rotate in chaotic orbits at a far distance from the planet. This indicates that Saturn recently captured these bodies from cometary or asteroids passing by.

The largest satellite of Saturn is Titan. In the solar system, he alone has a dense atmosphere, and in terms of magnitude he occupies an honorable second place. It can be viewed in a telescope, since it is smaller than the Earth only in half. This is a very interesting heavenly body, which scientists have already learned quite well. It is found that the satellite of Saturn Titan has a composition that is supposedly very similar to the composition of the Earth, which it possessed at the beginning of the nucleation. Scientists are of the opinion that in its atmosphere there are also processes that billions of years ago were characteristic of our planet.

Because of its opaque gas shell, which has a thickness of about 300 km, it was virtually inaccessible to astronomers trying to measure its diameter. Only with the advent of the latest achievements in the field of telescopic technology, conducted studies have shown that the depths of Titan can consist of equal parts of frozen water and hard rocks. Basically, its atmosphere is formed from nitrogen, which makes it look like Earth.

Previously, there was a hypothesis, which has not yet become obsolete, about the existence of rivers, lakes and seas formed from methane or ethane on this satellite. Methane is able to exist in three phases and maintain a semblance of the greenhouse effect, which is observed on this satellite.

Titan does not have a magnetic field, which means that he does not have a core that conducts a current. The surface temperature is estimated at 95 Kelvin, and the pressure exceeds the Earth's one and a half times. A low temperature does not allow the formation of more complex organic substances. However, it has its own magnetic tail, formed from interaction with the magnetic field of Saturn, in the magnetosphere of which Titan serves as a source of charged and neutral hydrogen atoms.

When studying the question of how many Saturn's satellites, probably, the most faithful will be the consideration of the largest. One of them is Mimos, which has a huge crater called Herschel, which is about 130 km in diameter. This is more than the size of many satellites of Saturn. Dion, Tethys, Enceladus and Rhea - they all belong to large objects and have deep craters and canyons, and Enceladus is also the lightest celestial body of the solar system.