Re: How many rings does Saturn have?

Hi Husani,

Saturn has six main rings. They are named, rather unimaginatively, A, B, C, D, E, and F.

Only the A, B, and C rings can be seen from Earth. If you look at a Voyager image taken from a distance, you can see these three rings. The A ring is the one furthest away from Saturn. There is a small gap near the outer edge of the A ring, called the Encke gap, after the astronomer who first saw it. Inside of the A ring is a larger gap, called the Cassini Division. Inside of the Cassini Division is the B ring, which looks slightly brighter than the A ring. Finally, inside of the B ring is the very faint C ring. The C ring is also called the crepe ring, because it reminded astronomers of crepe paper.

The last three rings were first seen by the Voyager spacecraft. The D ring is closer to Saturn than the C ring, and is even fainter than the C ring.

The F ring is further away from Saturn than the A ring (the rings were labelled in the order in which they were found, not in order of their distance from Saturn). You can see the F ring in this Voyager image. It's the thin bright line outside of the A ring.

The E ring (yes, it was actually found before the F ring) is even further from Saturn. Unlike the other rings, which are made up of millions of ice balls, all orbiting Saturn, the E ring is believed to be made up of gasses blown off of the moon Enceladus by ice volcanoes.

If we look very closely, we can see that the rings are not simple, uniform bands, but are actually broken up into thousands of "ringlets." You could see some of that in the image above, mostly in the B ring. The ringlets show up even more in this false color image. By false color, I mean that this isn't the actual color of the rings, but that the astronomers have modified the colors to make the ringlets stand out better.

The ringlets aren't separate rings. They are actually waves, caused by Saturn's moons. As the moons orbit Saturn, their gravity gives little "kicks" to the ice balls that make up the rings. These kicks move like waves on a pond, causing the ringlets that we see.