Saturn’s rings are the most famous feature of any planet - bright bands of light circling its equator. They look solid from far away, but they’re actually made of trillions of tiny icy chunks, ranging in size from grains of sand to boulders the size of houses.
The vast majority of that ice is water ice, lightly coated in rock dust. The rings stretch out about 175,000 miles from the planet’s surface - almost three-quarters of the distance from Earth to our Moon. But they’re shockingly thin. In most places the rings are only a few hundred meters thick. In some sections, only 10 meters - about the height of a three-story house.
We don’t fully know where the rings came from. The best theory is that they’re leftover bits of a small moon or comet that drifted too close to Saturn and was torn apart by its gravity. The rings are also slowly disappearing - they “rain” down into Saturn’s atmosphere and may be gone in a few hundred million years.
