What if saturn was our moon

Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. How can anyone understand a planet that is more than 1, times the size of our own? Imagine you were able to shrink the Sun to the size of a basketball.

At that point, the Earth would be reduced to the Life on Mars might be like this. And if you happen to go outside, it would be in your big In the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, there is a supermassive black hole feeding on nearby stars. And if a giant gravitational Garbage Day. You tie it all up into What would their What if there are other universes, just like ours?

With an infinite number of Earths? With uncountable versions of you? Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse. At about Could a black hole devour us all one day? There are millions of them out there just waiting. And if we happened to make a black hole accidentally, well, you better This rogue star has been traveling the Universe. Related videos. What If Jupiter and Saturn Collided? With a radius of 36, If Earth were the size of a nickel, Saturn would be about as big as a volleyball.

From an average distance of million miles 1. One astronomical unit abbreviated as AU , is the distance from the Sun to Earth.

From this distance, it takes sunlight 80 minutes to travel from the Sun to Saturn. Saturn has the second-shortest day in the solar system. One day on Saturn takes only Its axis is tilted by This means that, like Earth, Saturn experiences seasons. Saturn is home to a vast array of intriguing and unique worlds.

From the haze-shrouded surface of Titan to crater-riddled Phoebe, each of Saturn's moons tells another piece of the story surrounding the Saturn system. Currently, Saturn has 53 confirmed moons with 29 additional provisional moons awaiting confirmation. Saturn's rings are thought to be pieces of comets, asteroids, or shattered moons that broke up before they reached the planet, torn apart by Saturn's powerful gravity. They are made of billions of small chunks of ice and rock coated with other materials such as dust.

The ring particles mostly range from tiny, dust-sized icy grains to chunks as big as a house. A few particles are as large as mountains. The rings would look mostly white if you looked at them from the cloud tops of Saturn, and interestingly, each ring orbits at a different speed around the planet.

Saturn's ring system extends up to , miles , kilometers from the planet, yet the vertical height is typically about 30 feet 10 meters in the main rings. Named alphabetically in the order they were discovered, the rings are relatively close to each other, with the exception of a gap measuring 2, miles 4, kilometers in width called the Cassini Division that separates Rings A and B. The main rings are A, B, and C.

Rings D, E, F, and G are fainter and more recently discovered. Much farther out, there is the very faint Phoebe ring in the orbit of Saturn's moon Phoebe. That's because it's barely larger than Earth's moon, with a 1,mile radius. Jupiter, on the other hand, is the largest planet in the solar system, at 88, miles wide.

Saturn appears even more dramatic because of its rings, which add , miles to its diameter. Holmes also made a nighttime version of the scenario. This video shows the rings around Uranus, and Saturn's moon Dione also makes an appearance, orbiting Saturn at about the same distance as our moon. Of course, that means Dione would likely collide with Earth in the scenario depicted in the animation.

Holmes also suggested a DIY way to roughly re-create how big these planets would appear if they hung in the sky at the moon's distance. That's about the diameter of the moon," Holmes said. Maybe it doesn't take up the 'entire sky,' but it's pretty darn big. First, the amount of sunlight shining on the planets is "slightly off from reality," he said, to make details clearer.

The planets aren't tilted to exactly the right degree, and they aren't rotating at the correct speeds. Of course, if the planets got that close to Earth, the whole scene wouldn't proceed as calmly as it appears in Holmes' video.