Saturn's rings are thinner than most buildings are tall.
Saturn's rings are thinner than most buildings are tall. That isn't a figure of speech — in many places they measure around ten metres thick. Ten metres. Yet stretched side to side, those same rings span roughly 280,000 kilometres, close to the full gap between Earth and the Moon. If you scaled the rings down to the width of a football pitch, the thickness would be invisible to the naked eye. Finer than a sheet of paper, proportionally speaking. They're built almost entirely from water ice — everything from tiny grains to chunks the size of a house, all orbiting in an impossibly flat disc. And they won't last forever. Over tens of millions of years, that ice will drift away, and Saturn will lose them completely. Follow Deep Field Vault for more of the universe you never knew to ask about.