Your Age on Planet Saturn

Saturn is the sixth planet in the solar system from the sun and the largest after Jupiter. Both are gas giants and 'outer planets'. Saturn is named after the Roman god of agriculture, Saturn. Saturn is visible from Earth and has been known since prehistoric times.

Saturn's composition is very similar to Jupiter's. Saturn's core is fuzzy. There is no hard boundary between a solid core and the rest of the planet. Ice and rock from the core mix with helium and hydrogen. That mixture extends to about sixty percent of the entire planet. The fraction of heavy rock decreases towards the outside. So there is no hard limit.

In the center is a rocky core, surrounded by a mantle of liquid metallic hydrogen, followed by a layer of molecular hydrogen. The temperature in the core is 12,000 K. Due to the Kelvin-Helmholtz mechanism, Saturn radiates more energy than it receives from the sun. This energy emission is enhanced by the frictional heat released when helium collides with hydrogen in the mantle.

Due to its rapid rotation (10h 14m at the equator, 10h 41m at higher latitudes), Saturn is quite flattened towards the poles and the difference between diameter between the poles and the equator is almost 10% (120,536 km vs. 108,728 km). This phenomenon also occurs in other (gaseous) planets, but nowhere as strongly as in Saturn.

Another remarkable fact about Saturn is that it is lighter than water. The average density is only 0.687 kg per litre. It is the only planet in the solar system with a density less than water.

Saturn's atmosphere is made up of more than 96% hydrogen gas and just over 3% helium. The remainder is occupied by methane, water vapor, ammonia, ethane, propane, ethyne, and phosphine, which occur sporadically.

On Earth there is a clear division between land, water and atmosphere. Saturn, on the other hand, has only hydrogen layers that slowly change from a liquid form deep within the planet to the gaseous variant that occurs in the atmosphere, without a clear boundary. This is an unusual situation resulting from the enormous pressure and temperature on Saturn, called a supercritical state. As a result of the extreme pressure, the gases are compressed so that, at the point where the transition is normally expected, they have a density that still corresponds to that of a liquid. Saturn therefore has no clear planetary surface, but scientists use the point where the pressure is equal to 1 bar as a reference point. This is at the top of the cloud cover. Seen from space, Saturn's atmosphere shows a pattern of stripes or bands that resembles Jupiter. The difference, however, is that Saturn's bands are fainter and much wider around the equator. Voyager 1 detected complex cloud structures in the atmosphere that were not visible from Earth. Strong storms blow on Saturn, near the equator they reach speeds of up to 500 m/s in the upper atmosphere. At the North Pole is Saturn's Hexagon, a hexagonal cloud pattern with a strong storm in the center.

All gaseous planets in the solar system show a system of rings, but this was only discovered at the end of the 20th century. Saturn's ring system is by far the most striking and has been observed much earlier. In 1610, Galileo Galilei looked at Saturn and saw three objects instead of one. In astonishment, Galileo believed that the planet had two handles (ansae). When he looked again two years later, these had disappeared, only to reappear two years later, now more clearly than ever. Half a century later, thanks to improved telescope technology, Christiaan Huygens was the first to confirm in 1655 that this ansae was actually a ring around the planet. Huygens described a thin flat ring that never touched the planet. This was initially met with some skepticism, but was confirmed by Robert Hooke and Giovanni Cassini.

Cassini showed in 1675 that the ring actually consisted of two rings, between which there was a separation that was later called the Cassini separation. In 1858, James Clerk Maxwell proved that the rings must contain grit and pieces of rock.

There are 82 known natural moons. Saturn's largest moon is Titan (5150 km in diameter). There are further four moons with a diameter greater than 1000 km: Tethys, Dione, Rhea, and Iapetus. Enceladus is known for its ice volcanoes. It is difficult to distinguish between a small moon and a large chunk of the rings. On October 7, 2019, the discovery of 20 moons was announced. Saturn has since had the most discovered moons in the solar system.

Saturn is visible from the Earth as a bright yellow "star" that does not flicker. The rings cannot be seen, but with binoculars it can be seen that Saturn is not circular. A small telescope shows the rings well. The separations between the rings are used to test the quality of telescopes. The visibility of the rings also varies with the angle at which we see them from Earth. If the Earth is exactly in the plane of the rings, we look exactly at the edge and they are almost invisible. This was the case on 11 August 2009, after that it took 7.5 years before the rings were fully open again.

Do you want to know what would be your age if you were born on Saturn? So just select your birthdate in the above form and click on the calculate button and this tool will calculate and tell you how many revolutions Saturn has made on the Sun and its axis since your birthday. That is, how old are you on Saturn in years, months and days, along with this this calculator will also give the date of your next birthday on Saturn.

Saturn orbit around the Sun takes 10,759.22 Earth days. For easy understanding we have written some years in the table below and it has been converted to how many years on Saturn if you are x years old on Earth.