How long saturn year

The reason for this, it was argued, was that decreases in sunlight led to the formation of methane aerosols and the creation of cloud cover. From this, it has been surmised that the polar regions become increasingly obscured by methane clouds as their respective hemisphere approaches their winter solstice, and clearer as they approach their summer solstice.

Much like the length of a single year, what we know about Saturn has a lot to do with its considerable distance from the Sun. In short, few missions have been able to study it in depth, and the length of a single year means it is difficult for a probe to witness all the seasonal changes the planet goes through. Still, what we have learned has been considerable, and also quite impressive! We have written many articles about years on other planets here at Universe Today.

How Long is a Year on Earth? How Long is a Year on Mercury? How Long is a Year on Venus? How Long is a Year on Mars? How Long is a Year on Jupiter? How Long is a Year on Uranus? Venus : days. Earth : days. Mars : days. Jupiter : 4, days. Saturn : 10, days. Uranus : 30, days. Neptune : 60, days. A year on Earth is approximately days. We need to go back to the time of Galileo, except that we're not going to look at his work, but rather at the work of one of his contemporaries, Johannes Kepler Kepler briefly worked with the great Danish observational astronomer, Tycho Brahe.

Tycho was a great and extremely accurate observer, but he did't have the mathematical capacity to analyze all of the data he collected.

After Tycho's death in , Kepler was able to obtain Tycho's observations. Tycho's observations of planetary motion were the most accurate of the time before the invention of the telescope! Using these observations, Kepler discovered that the planets do not move in circles, as years of "Natural Philosophy" had taught. He discovered that they move in ellipses. A ellipse is a sort of squashed circle with a short diameter the "minor axis" and a longer diameter the "major axis".

He found that the Sun was positioned at one "focus" of the ellipse there are two "foci", both located on the major axis. He also found that when the planets were nearer the sun in their orbits, they move faster than when they were farther from the sun.

Many years later, he discovered that the farther a planet was from the sun, on the average, the longer it took for that planet to make one complete revolution. Here you see a planet in a very elliptical orbit. Note how it speeds up when it's near the Sun.

Kepler's third law is the one that interests us the most. It states precisely that the period of time a planet takes to go around the sun squared is proportional to the average distance from the sun cubed. Not for lack of trying and they're still trying , but just because the universe just doesn't work the way we thought it did, and the apparently simple question about the length of Saturn's day remains to be answered with other methods.

It approaches Saturn's rotation rate in a very different way, using ring seismology. Some wave structures in Saturn's rings are sensitive to the gravity field of Saturn. Gravity is a powerful way to investigate the deep interior of a planet. Their number, 10 hours, I will try to explain ring seismology, but it's not easy. There is a good explanation in this paper section 3. Feel free to skip this paragraph -- you don't need it to get the rest of the article!

Saturn like other planets has internal vibrations -- it rings like a bell, on many different frequencies. A very deep-toned bell, to be sure. These internal vibrations cause little perturbations in its gravity field in the space close in to the planet.

Saturn, unusually among planets, has a lot of particles orbiting in the space close to the planet that form a structure that we can see and measure -- the C ring. Certain frequencies of Saturn's internal vibrations resonate with orbits of particles in the C ring. Gravitational resonances with ring particles sculpt waves and gaps in Saturn's rings.

Waves in the outer parts of the rings especially the A ring and Cassini Division are shaped by gravitational resonances with the orbits of close-in moons, mostly Mimas, Janus, and Epimetheus; closer to Saturn, at the C and D rings, it's the planet's uneven gravity that's doing the shaping.

Some of these waves move faster than the orbital speed of the ring particles. That faster movement shows that the ring waves are sensitive to the planet's rotation.