Imagine something wider than the Moon's orbit, ten metres deep.
Imagine something nearly as wide as the distance from the Earth to the Moon — yet so flat you could stack only a few double-decker buses across its thickness. That's Saturn's ring system. About 280,000 kilometres from edge to edge, and in places just ten metres top to bottom. If you scaled it down to the size of a sheet of A4 paper, the rings would be far thinner than the paper itself. They're not rock — almost pure water ice, from specks of frost to chunks the size of a house. And they're temporary. Over tens of millions of years, they'll drift away and vanish. Every giant planet has rings, but none come close to Saturn's in brightness. Catch them while the solar system still has them. Follow Deep Field Vault for more of this.