The Most Wonderful of Worlds 



Myriads of small particles revolve in rings around 



' Saturn, a giant planet which has ten moons and 



which is so light that it would float in water 



IN the entire visible universe, there is 

 no body so mysterious, so beautiful as 

 Saturn and his marvelous system of 

 rings and planets. But the splendor of 

 Saturn was revealed only to modern times. 

 He became magnificent only after the 

 telescope was invented; for to the naked 

 eye, he appears only as a first magnitude 

 star, revealing nothing of his strange 

 appendages. 



It was not only the lack of instruments 

 that withheld the beauty of Saturn from 

 the ancients, but his remoteness as well. 

 The a:verage distance of Saturn from the 

 Sun is about 886,000,000 miles. That 

 enormous orbit around the Sun is traveled 

 in the space of twenty-nine and a half 

 years. In other words, a year on Saturn 

 is the equivalent of twenty-nine and a halt 

 of our years. But his day is only ten hours 

 fourteen minutes long. It must not be sup- 

 posed from this that Saturn is slow. In a 

 single second he covers nearly six miles — a 

 speed far greater than that of a rifle bullet. 



Saturn Would Float on Water 



Although Saturn is enormously larger 

 than the Earth, he is not nearly so dense. 

 If it were possible to drop Saturn into an 

 inconceivably vast ocean, he would float 

 like so much pine wood. And yet, so 

 enormous is the bulk of Saturn (his 

 diameter at the equator is, 75,000 miles) 

 that he weighs more than ninety-five times 

 as much as the Earth. 



A dense, cloak of clouds envelopes 

 Saturn constantly. What is behind that 

 cloak? No one knows. After an exhaustive 

 study the late Professor Percival Lowell 

 concluded that Saturn's interior was layered 

 like an onion. These various layer« rotate 

 at diff^erent speeds. 



The first man who ever made a study of 

 Saturn through a telescope, first because 

 he invented the telescope, was Galileo. 

 He could hardly believe his eyes when he 

 saw the planet through his feeble instru- 

 ment. He beheld the ring on edge. As 

 the years went by, what seemed at first 

 two thin arms extending out from each 

 side of the planet, opened. Once in every 



fifteen years the ring is so tilted that it 

 appears like a mere line. So Galileo had 

 to wait seven and a half years before the 

 ring changed in appearance. He did not 

 know that he was looking at a true ring — 

 so startlingly novel was the sight. He was 

 simply puzzled. 



It remained for Huyghens to announce 

 that "the planet is surrounded by a slender 

 flat ring everywhere distinct from its 

 surface." And he was the first astronomer 

 to predict the dates for the vanishing and 

 reappearing of the ring. 



The Marvelous Rings are Thousands 

 of Miles Broad 



The single ring which the older observers 

 studied has been resolved by modern high- 

 power instruments into three rings — an 

 outer bright ring, an inner bright ring and 

 a dark ring. The dark ring is called the 

 crape ring, because it suggests a veil in 

 texture. 



The dimensions of the various rings are 

 given on our drawing by Mr. Scriven 

 Bolton (reproduced from the Illustrated 

 London News and added to by the Popular 

 Science Monthly) and are those estab- 

 lished by Professor Barnard of Yerkes 

 Observatory. It is altogether probable that 

 if we had more powerful instruments than 

 those at present at our disposal, we would 

 be able to resolve these three rings into 

 still others. 



Sir Robert Ball has thus vividly pictured 

 the appearance of ringed Saturn: 



"Imagine that you stood on the planet Saturn, 

 near his equator; over your head stretches the ring, 

 which sinks down to the horizon in the east and in 

 the west. The half ring above your horizon would 

 then resemble a mighty arch, with a span of a 

 hundred thousand miles. Every particle of this 

 arch is drawn toward Saturn by gravitation, and 

 if the arch continues to exist, it must do so in 

 obedience to the ordinary mechanical laws which 

 regulate the railway arches with which we are 

 familiar. 



"The continuance of these arches depends upon 

 the resistance of the stones forming them to a 

 crushing force. Each stone of an arch is subjected 

 to a vast pressure, but stone is a material capable 

 of resisting such pressure, and the arch remains. 

 The wider the span of the arch, the greater is the 

 pressure to which each stone is exposed. At length 



