Saturn
116,460 kmacross
Saturn is 116,460 km across (9.1× wider than Earth) and orbits the Sun at 9.58 AU — about 1,433,147,595 km. Sunlight takes 1.3 hours to reach it. The jewel of the solar system — a ringed giant of hydrogen and helium with a vast retinue of moons.
▶ Visit Saturn in 3D
What kind of world is it?
Saturn’s rings span about 280,000 km — three quarters of the distance from Earth to the Moon — yet in places they are only around ten metres thick: proportionally thinner than a sheet of paper the size of a city. They are made of countless chunks of nearly pure water ice, from dust grains to house-sized boulders, each on its own orbit.
Saturn’s mean density is less than water — it would float. The rings may be younger than the dinosaurs, and are as little as 10 m thick.
Saturn by the numbers
Diameter
116,460 km
Distance from the Sun
9.58 AU
Sunlight travel time
1.3 hours
Surface gravity
10.4 m/s²
Temperature
−140 °C at cloud tops
A day lasts
10.7 hours
A year lasts
29.5 Earth years
Known moons
285+ (most of any planet)
Notable moons
Saturn has 285+ (most of any planet) known moons. The ones worth meeting:
Numbers only get you so far. The distances are the part nobody's brain handles — in the interactive view, switch to 1:1 scale and watch Saturn shrink to an honest speck on an enormous empty orbit.
Keep going
✓ Facts verified July 2026
Every figure on this page is a real, rounded value checked against primary sources. Found something out of date? See how we keep it accurate.