We May Owe Our Existence to Saturn

And more of why this gas giant is the best planet.

Saturn is my favorite planet. And I’m not alone — Neil deGrasse Tyson and Stephen Hawking have also admitted to favoring Saturn over the others (except maybe Earth). But whether or not you believe it truly is the best, you have to admit it’s always been the most photogenic. It’s an immense beauty, second only to Jupiter in size and with a sultry, soft peachy tone that makes it stand out not as garish or glaring, but timeless. In the night sky of Earth, one can make out the planet with the naked eye — a stunning little point of light gleaming golden amidst the night sky.

It owes the golden color to an atmosphere made mostly of hydrogen and helium, followed by trace amounts of ammonia, phosphine, water vapor, and hydrocarbons. It’s this rich collection of elements that lead scientists to believe Saturn was one of the first, if not the first, planet to form in our solar system. Along with Jupiter, Saturn absorbed most of the hydrogen and helium left over from the big bang, a cloud that was all but gone by the time the other planets in our system began to form. The planet’s broiling body is not just a beauty but also an antiquity, sharing with us a sample of the elements present at the beginning of time.

The gas giant would float were there an ocean big enough to hold it. Though of course no Earth ocean would suffice; 760 Earths could fit inside the cloudy giant and its cool, gleaming rings that boast a width of 180,000 miles — more than twice Jupiter’s diameter. They spin at breakneck speeds out in the deep dark of the solar system, glittering like fragments of gems with their shiny bodies made mostly of water ice and usually under 30 feet long. It’s this icy covering that reminds us how much water there really is even out beyond Earth, how many possibilities of life we haven’t yet exhausted not too far from home. The other planets beyond the asteroid belt also have thin, dim rings around them but none as celebrated as those of Saturn. In fact, Saturn’s rings are so complex that they contain samples of the rings of all the other planets combined.

How and when the rings formed is still in debate. Some believe the rings are the shattered remains of comets, asteroids, or moons. In some studies, it’s even suggested they may be made of dead dwarf planets. It’s also not known whether they are as old as the planet itself (4.5 billion years) or if they came to be only a few hundred million years ago. NASA has sent four probes out to investigate. Unfortunately, Saturn’s rings are set to vanish in around 50 million years, either because they have floated away from the planet and dispersed or because they have floated too close and were consumed by it.

Within the deceptively gentle body of Saturn is actually a thick layer of hot, smothering gases with pressure that builds as you go deeper within it, eventually crushing any spacecraft or traveler that hasn’t been killed by its massive storms. The hexagonal storm at the North Pole is large enough to fit six Earths, its winds reaching thousands of miles per hour. Over the years the storm has mysteriously changed color, presumably because of a change in seasons.

But despite the hostile environment of the planet, it nonetheless might be to thank for life here on Earth. Along with Jupiter, the sheer size of Saturn would have helped stabilize the solar system and prevented an onslaught of impacts from reaching the inner planets. With giant planets, impacts at the formation of a solar system happen for around 10 to 100 million years, as was the case with Earth. Without them, huge impacts can continue on for billions of years after a planet has formed. These impacts would not only wreak havoc on the surface of the planet but would destroy its atmosphere, dramatically lowering the chances for life to grow. The gas giants use their angular momentum to fling the asteroids and bodies out of the system or otherwise devour them to become part of the planet itself. The rocky bodies could also form dangerous clouds that send fragments towards Earth if they’re not kept in check.

That same gravitational influence could have helped push Neptune and Uranus into the outer regions of the solar system.

We’re also lucky that the giants are where they are. If Saturn was even 10% closer to us than it is, it would exert a pull on Earth’s orbit that would extend our path by tens of millions of miles. The new path would take us outside the habitable zone, endangering the chances of there being liquid water on the planet for a part of the year. As it is now we have an almost perfectly circular orbit that varies only 5 million miles throughout the year.

As if that wasn’t enough to add substance to Saturn’s beauty, consider the over 60 moons that freckle the space around it. Some of the moons are so large that we would label them planets if they were in orbit around our sun. Take the aptly named Titan, for example. Bigger than Mercury and the only other source of stable bodies of surface liquid in our solar system. It has a dense, versatile landscape. Mixtures of ammonia and water mean that the lava on this moon would freeze your hand at temperatures less than -150 degrees Fahrenheit. The sand dunes — quite similar in pattern and size to Earth’s — are flammable and there are streams of liquid methane bubbling in the surface crooks. This liquid methane and ethane could come from a warmer ocean deeper below the moon’s surface.

So whether the travelers of the future visit the planet to view it ringside, to see the ancient jewel of the solar system, or to visit any number of its curious moons, Saturn is a spectacle in our night sky.

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