January 20, 2015 at 5:11 pm

Picture of the Day: Earth Inside Saturn’s Rings

by twistedsifter

what-Earth-inside-Saturns-rings-looks-like

 

John Brady of Astronomy Central published an interesting post that compares objects in space with Earth and even land masses on our planet.

In the visualization above, Brady replaced the planet of Saturn with Earth to show how much larger it is, along with how massive Saturn’s rings are as well. As Brady explains:

“Saturn’s icy rings are composed of billions of particles from tiny grains right up to mountain sized chunks. The ring’s thickness is 1 kilometre, and they span around 175,000 miles (282,000 km), that’s about three quarters the distance from the Earth to the Moon.”

 

You can see this and several more fascinating visualizations on the original post at Astronomy Central. And if you think Saturn is big, check out this post that really puts the size of our solar system into perspective.

 

 

picture of the day button Picture of the Day: Earth Inside Saturns Rings