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Saturn is one of the planets that can be seen from Earth with the naked eye. It is the sixth planet from the Sun, between Jupiter and Uranus. With an equatorial diameter of 120,000 kilometres, it is the second largest planet in our Solar System after Jupiter. The temperature of Saturn's atmosphere is a chilly -180 degrees Celsius. Saturn is also the 'windiest' planet, with atmospheric winds of up to 1600 kilometres per hour, much stronger than in the atmosphere of Jupiter. Saturn is composed mainly of hydrogen and helium.
The ringed planet is nine times further away from the Sun than the Earth. From Saturn, the Sun would appear just one tenth of the size it does on Earth and the intensity of the Sun's radiation is just one percent of that which reaches us on Earth. Any given spot on Earth receives 90 times more sunlight than a comparable spot on Saturn. The further a planet is from the Sun, the more time it takes to complete an orbit. A year on Saturn is the same as 29.46 Earth years.
The planet's most striking feature is its unique ring system. This is composed of thousands of individual rings which themselves are made up of small chunks of ice, from the size of a speck of dust to the size of a family house. The particles that orbit around Saturn's equator are so densely packed together that from a distance, they appear as an opaque plane whose outermost ring has a diameter of 280,000 kilometres. Yet this 'plane' is less than one kilometre thick. Saturn's ring system is divided into seven main rings. These were named in the order in which they were discovered, not in the order of their distance from the planet. Starting from Saturn and working outwards, they are known as the D, C, B, A, F, G and E rings.